Billy G takes one for the whales | Home | A boat of a different color

Dear Defenders,
I remain completely astonished at the human capacity for cruelty and greed.
We are so deeply grateful for your presence out there. We are feeling utter despair back here on land. My friends are collecting a group donation to send.We fantasize about a whale spaceship aka startrek that comes and destroys all the japanese hunting fleets with amplified whalesong.Infact, we think there needs to be a third vessel moving next to japanese vessels playing this very music 24 hours a day so they can't sleep and it enters their dreams and their conscience (if they do indeed possess such a thing)!!
You are all great Bodhisattvas. May all beings be free from harm and danger!
thankyou so much.
Oceans of loving kindness to all the crews and those you seek to protect,
Padma Sujata

AND they have bellybuttons, as I learned for the first time from "Squiddy's Amazing Ocean Facts," currently deployed as a Google Earth overlay. You need to get google Earth for this to work.

After reading the Japan Fisheries Website http://www.jfa.maff.go.jp/whale/ and the ICR website http://www.icrwhale.org/eng-index.htm my conclusion is that none of this is really about whales, but fish.

Here's an example from the Japan Fisheries website

Q What has been learned from Japan’s research programs?

A "Much has been learned about the feeding habits of whales through analysis of stomach contents. The research has found for example that whales are consuming 3 to 5 times the amount of marine living resources as are caught for human consumption. In the waters around Japan we have a situation of declining catches in certain fisheries while at the same time the sampling from our research program reveals that minke whales are eating at least 10 species of fish including Japanese anchovy, Pacific saury, walleye Pollock and other commercially important species..."

In fact this "stomach analysis" occurs also on the ICR website wherein there are photographs of the stomach contents of slaughtered whales.

It is clear that there will not be any solution to this issue until we accept the real agenda of whale-killing nations such as Japan. That is, fish, not whales. In fact, although I have never tasted whale, I can't imagine it would taste too good - rather tough and tasteless like those overgrown turkeys that appear in the shops around Christmastime (I haven't eaten these either, they look totally inedible). According to other posts on this and other websites, only older Japanese eat whale, and young Japanese don't have a taste for it.

What is the answer then? As incredible as it sounds, the non-whaling nations will have to give fishing rights to the Japanese (and other whaling countries) equivalent to the amount of fish consumed by all these whales they kill. Only then will they feel not so hardly done by. In the process, non-whaling nations will have to eat less fish. This doesn't bother me, I'm a vegetarian. I can't stomach any of this brutality.

Will this happen? Going by history, not much happens without force.

Yours

Marine - Melbourne

The old argument that we have to kill off a species in order to replenish the resources it is supposedly decimating lost its credibility perhaps one hundred years ago. Without human intervention, both predator and prey species flourish; even to the degree that human intervention and "harvesting" of prey species is tolerable for both groups, to a certain point. In fact, prey species do not thrive without their natural predators. This is so well known that it cannot be considered adult science any more. It is the science taught to little children when they first discover the wondrous fact of the food chain. Caribou do not do nearly as well without wolves. Fish need whales. Shockingly, nature seems to have attained a harmonious balance without our help.

If the Japanese are upset about losing their available fish populations, perhaps they ought to help the species that keep the fish populations healthy. Perhaps they ought to stop decimating Earth's fisheries with the radical and irreversible destruction brought about by bottom trawling and the other practices that are proven to wipe them out.

The idea that one increases a prey population by destroying its natural caretaker guardians is only credible to those who have not had minimal instruction in biology. Because many humans have not, sadly, it is still a successful political maneuver, even though it makes the better educated drop their jaws in amazement at the falsehood and bravado. I can think of two current heinous slaughters that use this argument to justify their brutal acts. One is Canada's so-called "hunt" of harp seals. Canada used rapacious tactics and political agreements to destroy the Grand Banks cod fisheries, one of the richest and largest natural cod breeding grounds on the planet, if not THE richest and largest. Once this fishery had been eliminated by the equivalent of military warfare, and she suffered vast economic losses in her acquisition of cod, Canada decided that harp seals, whose diet consists of two to three percent cod, are to blame. Somehow, astoundingly, the Canadian government was able to convince Canadian fishermen that the brutal bludgeoning and skinning-alive of close to half a million harp seal puppies in their age-old breeding grounds would rescue the cod from its tragic plight. The slaughter, which like whaling is breathtakingly cruel, continues to this day. The cod have not recovered. Their breeding grounds are gone.

The Alaska Game Board uses the same argument for its egregious "aerial gunning" of wolves. Asserting that moneyed hunting groups would be able to bring home more trophy caribou if wolves were slaughtered, the Board several years ago, with the blessing of the misnamed federal Environmental Protection Agency, contravened American federal law and encouraged the practice of small planes locating families of wolves in the snow, pursuing them to exhaustion, and then landing and massacring them with gunfire, or shooting them from the air. One pregnant wolf had to be shot nine times before she stopped struggling to get up. This was a very manly victory for the gunner.

But at least she died. Many other family members are simply horribly wounded and left to die. No one has taken the time to calibrate how long various deaths from random gunshot wounds require before death. Certainly such observation is of no interest to the Alaska Game Board.

Marine from Melbourne, the argument is timeworn and has been proven false over and over again. If humanity would like the planet's fish back, we need to restore natural fisheries, catch fish in ways that do not destroy their breeding grounds, and protect their natural predators, who are the guardians of their health.

It's not about fish for the Japanese. It's about money. It's about the fifty million American dollars that line the pockets of the whaling companies in the aftermath of a season of killing. It's not even about the demands of the market any more, as you presciently have pointed out.

If money is truly the highest value and the most sacred object on the planet, then the Japanese, Canadians and Alaskan Game Board are doing nothing wrong. If life on Earth is more important, then what they are doing is both transparent and reprehensible, and it needs to be stopped.

Interesting proposition posted by Marine, but somehow I don't think this is the answer. Japan has demonstrated a voracious appetite for all fish species, and delicacies.
The reason for the decline of fish species in Japanese waters is the result of overfishing. There are now very few species of large whales (baleen whales) in Japan's waters, because whaling has depleted populations. That's why whaling fleet goes to Antarctic - besides trying to hide their nefarious deeds from the world.
Caving in to give the Japanese the power to consume more ocean life would only stall whaling for awhile. Once the oceans were more or less depleted of all fish, the Japanese would again turn to whaling.
What about the millions of sea birds that also consume fish and therefore compete with the fishing industry - no one is declaring that a cull of seabirds is necessary. It is purely economics - the sale of whale meat and the $$$.
The answer lies in being a less consumptive society - more of a vegetarian lifestyle. Stop overfishing the oceans to allow species to recover. Whales and all other species have a right to live, love, eat and reproduce without human interference. Many cultures feel it is their right to dominate and exploit the animal kingdom even to extinction.

I think what Green peace is doing is so cool.It is improving the world day-by-day.Keep it up please!

What the Japanese is doing is disgusting. They aren't even hunting in their own waters. I still dont understand why they cant be stopped. I mean we all know that they arent doing "scientific research". It is just ridiculous.

Due to their greed and arrogance, they continue. Yet, what they are doing impacts all of us.