A dead whale is a dead whale. It doesn't care who killed it or why or for what reasons. All it knows is that it is dead.

Given that, it has been more than a little disconcerting to listen to the political spin that has come in the wake of a decision by the International Whaling Commission to ban Alaska Natives from hunting bowhead whales.

The push to impose such a ban was led by Japan, which has seen its whaling proposals blocked by the IWC for decades.

Japanese whalers want to kill, cut up and sell some minke whales, of which there are many. Eskimo whalers here want to kill, cut up and pass around bowhead whales, which are said to be endangered.

All sorts of Alaska politicians have lined up to agree the former is bad, but the latter is good, because the intentions of our whalers are more noble. We've now all heard about how Alaska Natives have been killing whales for 4,000 years.

As if the Japanese just started whaling yesterday.

The fact is they've been whaling for generations, and they are as deeply tied to whaling as anyone in Alaska.

I am reminded here of how former Daily News editor Howard Weaver used to think I was too insensitive to the "lifestyle" of Cook Inlet commercial fishermen under attack from sport and subsistence fishermen.

Though millions of Southcentral Alaska salmon return to Cook Inlet each year, there are never enough to go around. Human nature is that everyone wants as much as he can get.

Commercial gillnetters want as many as possible because that is how they make a living. Anglers want as many as possible in the Kenai River because that just makes the fishing better, and the better the fishing the more fun for any individual anglers. Subsistence - or "personal-use," if you want to call them that -- dipnetters want enough to feed their families through the winter.

On the face of it, that latter might not sound like much, but if you figure these salmon will attract 20,000 or 30,000 people to the Kenai, with each expecting to put away 20 to 50 salmon for the winter, you're looking at a 400,000- to 1.5 million-salmon bite out of the shared pie.

That's a big bite.

I've always felt sorry for the commercial fishermen of Cook Inlet because of this, but never sorry enough to think they should be allowed to catch so many salmon that the recreational fishery that supports all those Kenai tourist businesses, not to mention my angling, went to pot. Never bad enough that I didn't figure I, like thousands of other Alaskans, should be able to dipnet myself some salmon to eat.

Does this make me greedy? I suppose so. We're all greedy to greater or lesser degrees. It is the nature of survival. But I could always think myself less greedy -- and thus nobler -- than the commercial fishermen of Cook Inlet, a whaling captain in Barrow, an Anchorage attorney, a crewman on a Japanese whale boat in the North Pacific Ocean, a professional politician like Gov. Tony Knowles, or the goofball outdoor editor at some Podunk newspaper.

What you do is a big part of who you are.

The Japanese, at least, seem to have some understanding of this. They relented on their stand against Alaskans whaling for endangered bowheads. They apparently decided that even though they can't whale, it is unfair for them to participate in the unnecessary and unwarranted punishment of other whalers. They have shown far more compassion than anyone in Alaska.

Our political leaders continue to stick to the position that there are somehow differences between dead Japanese whales and dead Alaska whales because we kill ours for "subsistence" -- the Holy Grail of wildlife and fisheries management in this state.

Let's be real.

Subsistence is, as all the anthropologists agree, a socio-economic system. It is an old and inefficient system. It is a system that can make it difficult for an Alaska Native in Anchorage to obtain fresh whale meat.

The Japanese long abandoned subsistence in favor of that socio-economic system we know as capitalism. It is simply more efficient. Capitalism makes it possible, or should, for someone in Tokyo to go to the fish mart and buy the whale meat she ate as child. At the same time, it allows, or should, for a whaler on the northern islands to obtain some cash so he can buy the equipment that makes his whaling, and his life, easier and more efficient.

As for the whales, they don't care which system drives the whalers. They are as dead when killed by a subsistence whaler as when killed by a commercial whaler.

Animal rights activists do, of course, draw a distinction. They have simple motives. It is easier to go after commercial whalers as "greedy." The "greedy" people who get money when dead whales go from a whaling ship to someone's mouth have a bigger public relations problem than Alaska Natives who can claim 4,000 years of whale meat going straight from the kill site to someone's mouth.

And never mind -- given the economic realities of the moment - that there might actually be unemployed whalers in Japan who have a greater need to kill plentiful minke whales than comfortably well-off Native oil field workers on the North Slope who want to kill endangered bowhead whales mainly to obtain community status.

The sad thing is that Alaskans have ignored all of this. At a time when we should be part of a drive to push the IWC to begin managing whales on the science of sustained yield instead of the politics of animal rights, the state's political leaders continue to push some myth about how a dead whale off Alaska's coast is somehow different than a dead whale off Japan's coast.

Did any of them ever stop to think that when the people who simply don't like whaling in any shape or form by anyone finally finish off the Japanese, Alaska whalers might, just might, be next?

Does anyone think that, in the end, the people offended by the sight of a bloody carcass really care who killed the whale?

Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.