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Thar She Blows! A Thread on Whaling
Hearthjaw
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A thread on whales, the people that hunt them, and those that don't think that's cool.
The Players:
Whales
Protected from big pointy slightly explosive sticks by international moratorium since 1986. However due to an apparent loop hole the bleeding has resumed.
Japanese Whalers
Japanese whaling boat have been plying their trade in the southern ocean under the guise of apprently legit scientific 'lethal research'. Their quota for this year was 935 minke and 50 fin whales. The left overs of the research are suspisciously perfect for sale and consumption in the Japanese market. Hmmmm.
The Activists
Greenpeace and the Sea Shepard organisations both participated heavily in anti-whaling protests and have for the last few years made their displeasure known right to the whalers, not always just with a placard or hose, ramming between ships has occured in the past.
IWC
The international whaling commission. Maintains a global whaling ban with exception to scientific research and for indigenous sustinence although it hardly has a means to enforce the bans except by way of angry letters.
Australia
The recent government has flung Australia back to the forfront of the whaling debate, due to then Opposition Leader, now Prime Minister promising to deploy the Australian Navy during the next whaling hunt (link here). Now in power and not as eager to declare war on a major trading partner a customs ship was sent instead. Just today the Federal Court of Australia ruled the whale hunt illegal and in breach of maritime laws. But unless the federal police/navy want to chase the whalers through the southern ocean or the whaling ship docks in an Australian port this ruling is unlikely going to mean much.
So, those are the players through my own rose tinted eyes, to make things more interesting, two protesters from the sea shepard boat (The Steve Irwin) who boarded a whaling ship have apprently been taken hostage by the whaling ships crew and tied to a mast.
The Players:
Whales
Protected from big pointy slightly explosive sticks by international moratorium since 1986. However due to an apparent loop hole the bleeding has resumed.
Japanese Whalers
Japanese whaling boat have been plying their trade in the southern ocean under the guise of apprently legit scientific 'lethal research'. Their quota for this year was 935 minke and 50 fin whales. The left overs of the research are suspisciously perfect for sale and consumption in the Japanese market. Hmmmm.
The Activists
Greenpeace and the Sea Shepard organisations both participated heavily in anti-whaling protests and have for the last few years made their displeasure known right to the whalers, not always just with a placard or hose, ramming between ships has occured in the past.
IWC
The international whaling commission. Maintains a global whaling ban with exception to scientific research and for indigenous sustinence although it hardly has a means to enforce the bans except by way of angry letters.
Australia
The recent government has flung Australia back to the forfront of the whaling debate, due to then Opposition Leader, now Prime Minister promising to deploy the Australian Navy during the next whaling hunt (link here). Now in power and not as eager to declare war on a major trading partner a customs ship was sent instead. Just today the Federal Court of Australia ruled the whale hunt illegal and in breach of maritime laws. But unless the federal police/navy want to chase the whalers through the southern ocean or the whaling ship docks in an Australian port this ruling is unlikely going to mean much.
So, those are the players through my own rose tinted eyes, to make things more interesting, two protesters from the sea shepard boat (The Steve Irwin) who boarded a whaling ship have apprently been taken hostage by the whaling ships crew and tied to a mast.
- Is Japans Hunt legit?
- Are the Greenpeace/Sea Shephard prostesters being a bunch of idiots, endangering their lives and others over a bunch of damned fish?
- Should commercial whaling be resumed albeit tightly controlled?
- Should the Australian Navy go down their and tell all these bastards whats what by way of torpedoes and some good old cannon action in the high seas?
steamid: sewersider
Hearthjaw on
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That said, the Navy could very well be out in force if there was any major part of our fishing industry being scavenged down there. They patrol the northern waters pretty closely, although the illegal fishing ops coming out of SE Asia are big and complicated enough that capturing more than a few ships is quite difficult - they keep the 'mothership' in international waters and send smaller boats in to get the fish, stuff like that. There's just not much down there of economic value to us, and there won't be until someone figures out how to transmute krill into gold. Or oil...
*ponders*
Whale are not considered fish.
I don't think the international community would be willing to do anything about this, it are just some beasts in the sea after all, not worth the fighting. The change must come from the Japanese people, but considering those folks eat everything and don't seem to care in the least about what the hell they're eating, I don't see that happening.
What? The Japanese are famous for their bad teeth. I mean, I'm generalizing here, but to me it doesn't look like the Japanese care what they eat.
Lies.
So the whole thing seems to have taken a new dimension with this..
A spokesman for the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, said: "The Government is investigating the reports as a matter of priority."
Sea Shepherd's international director, Jonny Vasic, said the two men were not allowed to leave the whaling vessel after delivering their letter. "We have a photo that shows that when they were held they were basically strapped by the arms with zip-ties and tied with rope around their chests, and then they were held there for several hours in the cold and then, about 2½ to three hours after that, they were taken below," he said.
Despite the photograph from Sea Shepherd appearing to show the two men having been tied up, the director-general of Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research, Minoru Morimoto, said: "Any accusations that we have tied them up or assaulted them are completely untrue."
Mr Morimoto accused them of trying to entangle the screw of the whaling ship with ropes and throwing bottles of acid onto the decks.(http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/whale-war-showdown-after-activists-captured/2008/01/15/1200159450446.html)
Now is it just me or is that pretty much the most foolish thing the whalers coulda' done?
Also I driving a species down the endangered list doesn't help the health of the species (or the overall ecology of the planet) for future generations. "We still have 100 Humpback whales alive on the planet. Unfortunately they are the sickly ones that like to watch reality tv"
Fucking up the ecosystem needs to stop. Maybe whales keep the crab-people in check? What happens when the crab-people overpopulate a region? Mass fucking chaos is what happens.
Fucking liberals and their gun control.
What a bunch of dicks.
I support the Japanese people and thier hunt for whales over these terrorists any day.
So, it's really all your (ancestors) fault.
Beat up your local supermarket staff do you? Architects, construction workers? Gas attendants, bus drivers? Most any work involving paper, and of course pretty much everything in a market economy since they tacitly support the trade & growth of industries which destroy renewable resources, er...
I don't know what you do, but I'm pretty sure you should be hitting yourself right now.
Of course, they might have said they couldn't promise they wouldn't kill it because they don't have sufficient mind control over every individual or crew on a whaling boat, and it's not always as easy to identify a particular whale as "oh look, Ahab is getting all antsy, must be a white wale around!" :roll:
For as far as I am aware Greenpeace has never murdered anyone. If you can find some proof of them willingly killing human beings we'll talk again.
Seriously. We should go back in time and shoot those mo'fos dead. But until we figure out time travel maybe we should concentrate on what we can do.
Well indirectly over 200 a year you could argue. They're hardly saints. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Greenpeace
Yeah, but you don't see how this might make them a little skeptical of being lectured to by the US? There is such a thing as entrenching opinion against you, so sometimes it's better to just shut up.
hahahha
Who saw that coming?
Also isn't Sea Shepherd the more radical organization?
what if the whales are Japanese too?
or if greenpeace has Japanese memers?
what will you think then?
seriously though when has greenpeace ever killed someone?
https://medium.com/@alascii
But...by...THEN...we'll....allbe...speaking..like......THIS! Andwearing......LYCRA!
So we'll be pretty fucked anyway.
Except Greenpeace was actually founded by the Canadians and the IWC is an international body. The political situation is like land mines for the US, but I'm pretty sure our military just reserves the right to use them instead of actually going through with it. I'm sure there can be some compromise, but I think both sides might be a little too entrenched though.
KA: "You know, Pearl Harbour wasn't that bad of a thing."
Anyway, whaling is absolutely disgusting thing. Whales are totally awesome.
But nonetheless, fair or not, Greenpeace gets much of its money & support from the US, and is seen as representative of western (US) opinion saying: we did this to get rich, but you can't do it now. There have been several comments by US govt officials about whaling as well, and it's a US/Japan diplomatic issue. The Japanese might be wrong in seeing it as a totally US point, but equally nobody anti-whaling is doing a very good PR job of making themselves look particularly independent.
Of course you do.
How does stopping the Japanese from driving whales into extinction = destroying a nation? Is the whaling industry that vital to their economy?
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
And ramming ships and leaving the crew there doesn't make them killers?
Edit:http://www.icrwhale.org/collision0.htm
Killing usually indicates that someone, you know, died.
Does the crew die?
How profitable is whaling these days really? It used to be about whale oil which we have better cheaper alternatives to now anyway.
Thats why I was asking, has Greenpeace ever killed anybody?
https://medium.com/@alascii
I was gonna stay out of the thread, but I can take this one. It's proffitable, pretty much any fishing industry is profitable, but the problem is that the competition both cuts into profits and kills the game. It's like the alaskan crab hunters. They made huge bank, then everyone saw that show on discovery and said "I want to work hard and make 40K for one months work!". After that show the percentage of boats in that area went up something crazy, like 20%, and it completely screwed up the conservation plan because more people meant more competition, which meant less crabs. Now you have to win a lottery to be able to fish there, and things are getting back to normal. It's not a completely unreasonable solution that might work here too.