Whaling
I was very disturbed when the other day I heard a Norwegian official defending whaling on the grounds of it being a tradition and ecological ocean management. When in fact it is merely the barbaric torture and slaughter of an intelligent creature that we know so little about for commercial reasons. I could buy the tradition argument in Iceland or Norway's case if they went out in rowing boats and hand threw harpoons at any that they happened to see while not grafting at the oars. Other than a few coastal villages, the Japanese have only been eating whale since the Second World War, so there is no cultural excuse.

There's nothing traditional or humane about chasing down whales using sonar in diesel powered death cruisers and firing a harpoon tipped with a hand grenade then hauling it back to ship, shooting at it with rifles and hanging it upside down with blowhole subsurface so it drowns to death before craning it into a factory ship for processing into Minke burgers for the rich consumers of this food. There is no humane way to slaughter an animal this size. It should be stopped.

Japan and Norway are expected to slaughter around 2000 whales this year, for "Scientific Research" as there has been an IWC moratorium on commercial whaling since 1985/6. Although exactly why you need to kill 2000 whales a year for research and how putting the meat on supermarket shelves constitutes scientific research is a bloody mystery. Every year many whales become stranded in shallow waters for reasons we do not understand, if scientific research is necessary, these could be used. If you wanted to study what is man would it be easier to do with 2000 corpses ? This wednesday Greenpeace Germany parked the 20 tonne carcass of a fin whale that had become stranded on the Baltic coast and died, outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin to demonstrate this point.

Every year, the Japanese bribe poor nations with no interest in whaling to join the IWC in order to help them tip the balance at the next vote in the hope that they can gain some quasi-official sanction for their continuance and increase of this dirty trade.



A Japanese whaling ship rammed the Greenpeace vessel harrying them in the southern ocean earlier this month, if you can afford to do something to help them or are just interested, go here.

Bastards!

Meanwhile, today in London, a 7 tonne bottlenose whale has found itself swimming up the Thames past The Houses of Parliament and everyone concerned is trying to gently persuade it to swim back out to sea. Now isn't that a better approach?