How does Mowat's A Whale for the Killing reflect what was happening with whaling in 1982?

Farley Mowat (1921–2014) was one of Canada's most distinguished and prolific environmental writers. He served with some distinction in the Canadian Army in World War II and then returned to Canada to study zoology at the University of Toronto. Although he did not complete his degree, Mowat worked as a field technician for the American naturalist Francis Harper and also as an assistant in the Canadian Wildlife Service. In his studies of the barren-ground caribou, he began to get a sense of the devastating effect modern Western civilization had on both native populations and wildlife, understanding how the traditional philosophies and practices of the First Nations peoples had created a sustainable lifestyle for humans and animals that was being destroyed by the descendants of European immigrants.
In 1982, two dramatic incidents led Mowat to write A Whale for the Killing. The first was Canada's withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission over the IWC's decision to enact a moratorium on commercial whaling due to depletion of whale stocks. The second event was the one described in his book in which neighbors whom he had previously considered good people tortured a trapped whale for amusement. For Mowat, these two events were linked together in the way they reflected a callous and destructive attitude towards our ecosystem and the creatures within it.
The background to these events had to do with the decline of whale and cod stocks off the Atlantic shores of Canada due to overfishing, and especially the technological innovation of factory ships that led to intensification of fish and whale harvests. Overfishing was leading to precipitous declines in cod catches. The peak cod catch in 1968 was 800,000 tonnes, but it declined by sixty percent by 1975, leading to a total collapse in 1992 and a ban on cod fishing. Given the importance of fisheries to the Maritimes' economy, rather than blaming themselves for destroying stocks, many people living in the Maritimes responded with anger against even the relatively weak efforts of the Canadian government to preserve marine life at a sustainable level.
Farley Mowat saw that much of the fishing industry relied what we would now call "toxic masculinity," taking pride in the torture of innocent marine creatures as an assertion of masculine strength, something that can still be seen in the euphemistically-termed seal "harvest," which involves clubbing baby seals to death.
https://www.greenpeace.org/archive-international/en/campaigns/oceans/seafood/understanding-the-problem/overfishing-history/cod-fishery-canadian/

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/whaling