Sea Shepherd Epic Win
The Sea Shepherds have defeated the Japanese whalers. Woot woot.
First a little background.
The Japanese have continued to commercially hunt whales even with the international whaling ban, a treaty which they have signed. They kill about 1,000 whales per year, mostly in the Antarctic whale sanctuary.
In the last few years, they have been increasingly harried by an environmental action group called the Sea Shepherds. This group, founded by the crazy but intelligent Paul Watson, is sort of a militant wing of environmentalists for the oceans. Funded by the hit TV show Whale Wars and by a couple of big donations (Bob Barker and Steve Irwin both donated large funds and have ships named after them).
Now, let me be clear, I do not generally support militant environmentalism, or a lot of the ecomentalist BS which is foisted upon the world. But whales are different. Whales are intelligent animals, possibly the most intelligent animals on earth (including us - some studies show that humpbacks especially may in fact be more intelligent than we are) and at a minimum highly intelligent animals which are at population levels still far far below they were 300 years ago.
Though they tried all kinds of different tactics (throwing stink bombs, trying to foul props with ropes, harassing the ships with small inflatables, boarding the ships in protest) they found that with their new faster ships, the absolute best tactic they had was to find the Nisshin Maru factory ship, and simply sit right behind it, blocking the slipway so that no whales could be processed.
Above is an image of a whale being brought onto the factory ship from a harpoon ship. The Steve Irwin will try and get right behind the factory ship, and block this from happening. And this year, they did it early in the season, and have been sitting right behind the Japanese ship for weeks.
And now, the Japanese are turning tail and running. They say that it is because of safety, but it is really because they are not making any money. Paul Watson, crazy as he is, is no idiot, and his whole purpose was to make whaling a bad economic proposition. Now that they realize they wont be making money (the clear purpose of the Japanese fleet - they care as much about science as Exxon Mobile does about geology research) they are getting the hell out of there.
Run assholes, run.
The Sea Shepards have found that there's still some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.
ReplyDelete