I remember hearing exaclty the same thing in the 1970s. Four decades later and whales still aren’t extinct.
Want to watch a liberal’s head explode? Tell him that you favor the rights of indigenous peoples to hunt and eat whales as they see fit without the white man telling them how to live their lives.
The problem isn’t “indigenous peoples” doing subsistence hunting. It’s a handful of countries (e.g. Japan, Norway) doing huge scale commercial whaling for profit, selling the meat to restaurants where is sold to people who pay high prices for this “delicacy”.