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Here are the reasons I can see not to eat whales:

1. They might be as intelligent as the average three-year-old (that's the average intelligent three-year-old; we're talking approximately university-level educated for Republicans, obviously).
2. They contain nasty chemicals, due to being on top of their personal food chain and therefore likely to have ingested all the yuckies that their prey ingested, which in turn will have ingested all the yuckies that their prey ingested, and so on recursively.

These are also good reasons not to eat dogs, people (point 1 except for Republicans again, point 2 definitely), cows (bulk hormones and BSE = point 2 in spades), goats, pigs (smarter than dogs), chickens, sheep (point 1 not an issue here) and so on.

Clearly, the only sensible food is plants.  The vegans were right!

Except that all the vegans I've ever met (with one exception, whom I married) are raving fruitloops.  If they're right about this, it's got to be a fluke.

So the real reason not to eat whales, when you cut through all the cultural debate and scientific maybes, can be expressed as follows:

1. Ewwwww!

There.  I hope that's sorted the question for you.

From David Brin:

"I'm not a real expert," I tell them. "But the data are pretty easy to interpret. I'm afraid real dolphins simply aren't all that smart. Those folktales about high cetacean intelligence, at or above our level, are just stories. It's a shame, but they just aren't true."

- The Dogma of Otherness

So yes, if we assume the intelligence of whales and dolphins to be roughly equivalent (and if they're not, it's not going to be the whales that come out in front) then the best we can say is that whales are at least smarter than the cows that give us those lovely steaks. But that's not saying much; hell, even some Creationists are smarter than cows.

So: whale hunting is bad, but for reasons of conservation and ecological sense, not because they're The Other Sentient Meat.

These guys are heroes, not pirates? How insane is that?

Listen: killing whales is dumb, stupid and short-sighted; I agree. It might also be cruel, but hell: let only the radical vegans cast the first stone, because I love a good steak and the cow wasn't exactly a willing volunteer either. But boarding a ship in international waters? Throwing stuff at the ship? Harassing the crew? That's not dumb; that's piracy. If Steve Irwin had a good name to start with, the crew of the Steve Irwin have wrecked it. And the journalists who report this activity as youthful hijinks, ecological activism or whatever: they need to be reprimanded and put on flower show duty until their ethics glands regenerate.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.