It's not like rotten meat, either. No one knows what it is yet, and the hunters of Chukotka are afraid. If this is true, then all the meat is poisoned, and we may be poisoning ourselves by eating it. But we have no choice. Such fears are entirely reasonable.
Gray whales are bottom feeders.
They use suction to draw sediment and prey from the bottom of the ocean, then filter the water through their baleen plates and ingest the remaining prey, along with sand and other bottom materials. As a result, they are highly exposed to chemical contaminants that have settled to the ocean floor. If the whale stinks bad enough that people won't eat it, whatever's in it is probably in extremely high concentration, which means it should be easy to test for, even in whales that are contaminated but don't stink. This summer, researchers funded by the National Marine Fisheries Service will travel to Chukotka and take samples from the whale hunters' kill. Then we'll have to try to figure out how harmful it is, and where it's coming from.