by Jennifer Pritchett
Northern News Services

NNSL (DEC 16/96) - Inuvialuit hunters from Tuktoyaktuk say they were forced to kill 20 beluga whales trapped beneath early-season lake ice last week.

However, it is possible, the whales might have escaped the ice - and their deaths - if a whale monitor to prevent exactly that scenario had still been in place.

Ron Allen, area manager for the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, said the whale monitor program, designed to scare whales away from the entrance to Husky Lakes before freeze-up, was cancelled after the 1995 season.

The Fisheries Joint Management Committee, a federal-Inuvialuit agency, decided it wasn't effective.

But Allen said that it would be pure speculation to say the program's cancellation had anything to do with this incident.

Believed to have been trapped in the lakes since early fall, the whales were killed by Inuvialuit hunters when they couldn't be freed from the ice.

Allen said fisheries officials decided to leave the mammals in the lakes this summer in hopes they would swim out on their own.

"Given there was no conservation issue and that the number of animals didn't constitute a conservation crisis, it was decided to leave them alone," he said.

The group of 20 whales was struggling to breath through a one-metre hole in the ice, said Lloyd Gruben, a Renewable Resources officer in Tuktoyaktuk and a member of the team that killed the whales.

"As we were preparing our gear to harpoon the whales, we could hear them labouring to get air," he said. "It was awful."

Eight of the whales were young, measuring less than two metres in length. The rest of the animals were more than three metres long.

The animals were harpooned, roped and then shot when they approached the hole to get air.

Gruben said that the animals were starving to death, and had to be killed.

"After we cut them open, some of them were in very poor shape," he said. "We found gravel and rocks in their stomachs. There was one herring in one whale's stomach."

The local hunter's and trapper's association is trying to use as much of the whale meat as possible.

"They've left meat for other communities as well," he said. "I don't know how many have gone out to get the meat but it's out there on the ice."

The slaughter is a sad reminder of a similar 1989 killing of about 40 whales in the area who were stuck in ice.