Battle turns to rare fin whales (more endangered than humpbacks)

[Barrett808]

Source: The Dominion Post

Battle turns to rare fin whales
By TOM FITZSIMONS - The Dominion Post | Monday, 24 December 2007

Humpback whales may be safe for now, but a fresh wave of pressure is building on Japan after its vow to continue hunting the even more endangered fin whale in the Southern Ocean.

...

It will be the first time fin whales - the second largest creatures on the planet - have been hunted since the 1960s. They were brought to the edge of extinction before commercial whaling was banned in 1986, and even now may number only 5000 in the Southern Ocean.

The Australian Government made a formal diplomatic protest, backed by 31 countries, in Tokyo on Saturday night to mark the start of Japan's whaling season.

Sir Geoffrey Palmer, New Zealand's commissioner to the International Whaling Commission, said killing fin whales was unacceptable. "They are more endangered than humpbacks and they are much bigger. These animals are very difficult to study. The idea that you're going to kill them off before you find out about them is really pretty awful."

Read more: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4335692a7693.html

[xchrom]

1. what's with savagery in the japanese government?

pure barbarism.

[saigon68]

4. They are not really Barbarians

They are worse than barbarians-- a group of thugs and primitives

[Judi Lynn]

8. Defective consciences, malignant personalities. n/t

[ladjf]

14. They are bandits, stealing whales from the ocean. nt

[flvegan]

2. K&R!

[LeftyMom]

3. The Aussies and Kiwis are doing a great job of keeping the pressure on.

[Omaha Steve]

5. Just like Canada

In Japan public opinion is always against the whale hunt at around 75%. Canada has about the same figure against the seal hunt. A BIG R!

OS

[Judi Lynn]

6. Didn't know about public opinion and the seal hunt. That's good news.

There are such clear, easily grasped reasons to NOT club seals to death and slaughter whales. My god.

It's time doing the RIGHT thing started getting the upper hand, at long last.

[knitter4democracy]

7. The reasoning is that they have to kill them to count them.

Really. I heard it on BBC World in an interview of a spokesman from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. In order to prove that their numbers are higher, they have to kill them. It's not for any real study of anatomy or physical changes due to environmental toxins or pollution--nope, it's to count them.

[formercia]

9. And when they're all gone

The Japanese government will declare them officially extinct.

[dantyrant]

10. How many puppies can we give them to stop this?? nt

[gordianot]

11. Why don't they just hunt for Godzilla.

[Plucketeer]

12. We shouldn't have stopped

at just Hiroshima and Nagasaki. :nuke: We should have cooked them all so we could get an accurate head count! :crazy: :nuke:

[NekoChris]

16. Wow.

I'm going to copy and paste this post for the next time someone on here attacks me for one of my views. It's nice to know that whatever I may think that goes against the 'grain' of popular thought on here there's always going to be someone so completely out of right field that I'll be in the center again.

Not every Japanese citizen is for whale hunting I am sure, the majority of them could probably care less and have far more important things to do. And yeah we should have nuked the rest of them and then we would have completely stopped a country that exploded into a technological giant and provides an overwhelming amount of the equipment we use on a daily basis. Great thinking there. Stay focused on the problem at hand.

[The Stranger]

13. Calling Sea Shepherd . . .

Defend. Conserve. Protect.

"Stand by to ram!"

[Judi Lynn]

15. Activists Split Over Policy on Japanese Whaling

Activists Split Over Policy on Japanese Whaling
By Stephen de Tarczynski

Credit:Sea Shepherd

A Sea Shepherd vessel closes in on the Japanese whaler Kaiko Maru

MELBOURNE, Dec 26 (IPS) - As Australia continues to call on Japan to abandon its whaling program, leading environmental groups are divided in their response to the government’s plan to stop Japanese whaling.

"We welcome the moves made by the (Kevin) Rudd government to step up pressure on Japan against their illegal whaling in the Southern Ocean," Greenpeace Australia Pacific chief executive, Steve Shallhorn, told IPS.
(snip)

"With the announcement this week, Australia has really stepped forward as the lead government in opposing whaling in the Southern Ocean," says Shallhorn.

While Greenpeace -- which Shallhorn says will use "inflatable boats to get as close as we can to the whales so that the harpoon gunner doesn’t have a clear shot to kill whales" -- has welcomed the moves by the Rudd government to lobby for an end to the hunt, the more militant Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says that the monitoring of the Japanese fleet is not enough.

"These whales are being killed now and collecting evidence for some ‘down the road’ international court case that the Japanese will simply ignore is not going to stop the killing," says Sea Shepherd founder, Captain Paul Watson, via email from aboard one of the society’s ships, the Steve Irwin.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40590