Taking five whales a year would not have any biological impact on the population.

Between the time we proposed to list these animals as threatened and now, we've discovered the population is in a more delicate situation than we had assumed.

This is not the sort of thing that you crank out in a weekend,

The Makahs are hardly responsible for what somebody else does. The Makah have a clear right (under an 1855 treaty) to hunt gray whales.

Clearly, if we don't do anything, I think it's accurate to say a number of populations of salmon will be extinct or close to extinct in 100 years,

The actual hunt is a long way off. This is not a rubber-stamp process.