Prompted by environmental campaigners, UK supermarket group Tesco has announced it will drop whale and dolphin meat from its newly acquired Japanese stores immediately.
Go deeper with GlobalData
According to Tesco, the company took the decision ‘due to a lack of customer demand’ but campaigners such as the Environmental Investigation Agency said that it, along with other groups, had pressed Tesco to stop selling whale meat.
Although there is a worldwide ban on commercial whaling, Japan is permitted to catch up to 540 whales a year for scientific research purposes. Most of the 3,000 tons of whale meat on Japanese supermarket shelves comes from this cull.
