The whaling lie

I thought that when I heard about this a day ago. Exactly what experiments are being performed, here?
And why are news outlets constantly repeating it, sans that information?

They're researching into the most efficient ways to kill whales.

Aren't their faces going to be red when the alien probe arrives in the 23rd century.

But seriously... few things disgust me as much as whaling. And from what I understand whale meat isn't even all that popular in Japan.

This is bloody slaughter for the sake of bloody slaughter..

You say that like it's a bad thing.

This is such a crock. They claim whaling is for "research". I'd like to see the peer-reviewed papers written about this research. Can't imagine there would be very many. They claim it's for research but then give away the lie by also claiming that whale-hunting is their "tradition". (a tradition since 1946 that is). Most of this whale meat ends up sitting on supermarket shelves and getting tossed in the trash at the end of the night because nobody buys it. Only very few restaurants serve it.
I hope Australia comes through and boards their vessels if they enter Aussie territorial waters.

Research huh? Yeah, that one's dead....and that one, and that...and we can absolutely prove they're dead by showing the folks back home.
I know, how about they do research on creationists? It's not as if they're even slightly endangered, and if they did go extinct I think I personally could bear the pain.

Apparently they aim to kill 1000 whales: 900 Minke Whales, 50 Humpbacks and 50 Fin Whales. Assuming this is bona fide (yeah right) scientific research, it must have passed an ethics commitee. I'd like to know which one, I had to go through hell just to take blood samples from domestic horses!

This makes me so ANGRY!!! What information do they expect to gain???

The New Yorker has an excellent profile on Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society battling (literally) Japanese whaling vessels off the coast of Antarctica.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_khatchadour…

As a small trade dependent country, it would be within the realm of possibility to organize and promote a global boycott on Japan and see fast results.

Not that I support this butchery under the pretense of research but here's an article on the BBC web site that describes some of the science...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6667907.stm

I'm sure the academics here can follow up.

There is negligible demand for whale meat, and this has always been so.

Whales were primarily hunted for oil, which was used as fuel. (Mineral oil is a relatively recent utility. A couple of centuries years ago, oil deposits were often regarded as a menace, as they damaged what would have been good farmland. Only with the advent of oil refining did this attitude change.) The meat was essentially a byproduct, which due to its unpopularity often found its way into petfood.

Now that whale oil has been usurped by mineral oil, there is no need whatsoever to hunt whales. Even within Japan, there is practically no demand for whale meat. Despite attempts to palm it off onto reluctant school children, there are still huge stockpiles of it.

This resumed whaling amounts to "Neh neh neh! You can't tell me what to do!".

The Japanese don't need to kill whales for food. They are a rich first world nation. The money spent cruising around Antarctica could be better spent on beef and chicken dinners.

There is a stereotype in international circles of the "Ugly Japanese" for the behavior of some of their tourists and businessmen when abroad. (Americans aren't very high on the list either for the same reasons.)

I'd boycott Japanese products except that they make great cars.

Actually, I have seen a fair number of science papers come out of whaling. In the past, I've given students the assignment of finding scientific papers on any subject of their choice, and "whales" are pretty popular out here on the prairie. So, yes, there are papers on all sorts of topics that come out of whaling.

I remember seeing one that analyzed the effects of explosive harpoons on whale carcasses, and it's legitimate, that couldn't be done without a whaling industry. Most were analyzing populations using killed whales as samples, and examined blood and tissue for relationships. These did NOT require a whaling industry to be done, and always seemed counterproductive to me -- analyzing population structure as you rip the population apart seems futile.

I don't know how whale meat tastes. The arctic natives kill and eat a lot of seals. I'm told by conventional standards that seal meat tastes terrible.

To be fair, not all whales are endangered. Being a born and raised Icelander, another traditional whaling nation, I can (or rather tend to) see the other side of the issue, and can feel quite appalled by the double standards when it comes to killing animals for food. You sometimes get the feeling that whaling nations - being few - are easier targets than say pork, beef or mutton eating nations.

(...although they aren't as few as you'd think, Norway and Japan by far the biggest, but the rest hunt about as much as the others, and that includes the USA. I looked but couldn't find a chart to back this up though... in fact, finding actual whaling statistics seems to be difficult, or my google-fu is weak today.)

The scientific whaling, at least in Iceland, can also be somewhat justified as not much is known about their feeding habits or their effect on the fish reserves around the island, which is very important for the economy of the island (follow the money). The feeling that the scientific whaling is a cover-up is strong though, even in Iceland.

So, with all that said, the campaign against whaling *has* been successful, on merit or not, so there simply isn't a market for whale meat anymore, so I was also appalled when Iceland resumed commercial whaling seemingly just out of spite, and now the Japanese are doing the same.

As far as I know the triumphant Icelandic commercial whaling which resumed with a bang not too long ago pathetically fizzled out again, so here's hoping the same will happen with the Japanese.

So, to summarise, my feelings go with the whaling nations when I see biased, one-sided arguments against whaling, but against them when they do hunt whales seemingly just to show off. So most of the time when whaling comes up, I just feel extremely uncomfortable about the whole thing. Messed up, innit?

Just tell them that every time a whale gets saved in the Amazon, Mishima sighs in the sea.

What a farce...

These fleets are exploiting loopholes by disguising as research... who approves the research? Why is the loophole not closed or tightened?

"Note the big "RESEARCH" stenciled across the hull."
If the Pentagon see this, they'll start stencilling "LOVE" on the side of tanks.

Whaling on an industrial i.e. larger scale is also done in Norway and Iceland is set to resume it. Besides Japan has put enough pressure and/or incentives on smaller nations that the IWC ban on whaling will probably be overturned within a few years.
Of course whales are also killed by native hunters all over the arctic with the justification that it is necessary for their biological and/or cultural survival. Der Spiegel had an interesting piece a few days ago on narwhal hunting by Inuit in Alaska making the point that they (the Inuit)appear to retrieve only one out of 6 to 10 whales they actually hit. The remainder, apparently, either get wounded and manage to get away or sink. Not a pretty picture.

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/0,1518,514970,00.html

This is almost the same as calling Hiroshima, Nuclear Research.

"You sometimes get the feeling that whaling nations - being few - are easier targets than say pork, beef or mutton eating nations."

However, neither pork, beef, nor mutton are endangered species. Come up with a good way to farm whales, then complain about a "double standard".

When Iceland resumed whaling a year or so ago, there was an immediate knock-on effect of people cancelling holidays there, with a significant loss of national income. Whether was an ongoing result or just a passing phase I don't know. Either way, it would be far more difficult to create a similar effect on an economy as powerful as Japan's.

This news does make me despair for humanity though. As the great naturalist and conservationist Peter Scott famously remarked, 'If we can't save the whale we can't save anything'. And along with them gorillas, orangutangs, siberian tigers, snow leopards, black rhino...

The Australian Labor Party should adopt "Big Balls" by AC/DC as its anthem.

The official story I heard on the nature of Japan's whale research is that it's mostly focused on looking into commercial uses for whales.

So yeah, I guess it is technically research, and it is technically research that needs to be done using giant piles of dead whales.

It's also a total crock.

Yes, Tycho, tourism is probably the only way you can hit Norway or Iceland's whaling activities. What else are we going to boycott ? Imported lutefisk ? Hardly worth the effort. Besides that might quite well place an unbearable burden on those culinarily-cutting-edged Minnesotans...

The Japanese remind me of the Brits who continued to hunt foxes after that "sport" was banned.

Thanks for speaking up about this, PZ. Governments dismiss the arguments of animal rights activists, perhaps they won't do the same when the protest is coming from the scientific community.

From the Guardian newspaper (UK) yesterday:

"Japanese officials told the crowd that Japan should not give into anti-whaling activists. "They're violent environmental terrorists," the mission leader, Hajime Ishikawa, told the crowd. "Their violence is unforgivable ... we must fight against their hypocrisy and lies."

What toecurling, despicable hypocrisy.

Governments dismiss the arguments of animal rights activists, perhaps they won't do the same when the protest is coming from the scientific community.

Please don't turn this into an "animal rights" issue. The same goes for finning sharks. It's the ecological considerations and the threat of losing the whales and sharks that have been the key motivators for action against whaling and finning. If this turns into another talking point from the "Zebrafish are people too" crowd, it's going to lose its credibility.

The morality of killing whales aside, I think that outrage over the fact should be, at the very least, controlled; when it isn't, you get groups like Sea Shepherd that sink whaling ships and kill whalers in the name of the whales. These people are criminals and murderers and should not be allowed at the debate table.

I don't care how many whales a man has killed, or how many people, nothing - not a SINGLE THING - warrants the killing of one human being by another.

Maybe we should catch up on our torpedo research.

I know of several small-scale commercial uses for whale products, none of which can be synthesised adequately. Natural ambergris is a great perfume, either on its own or as a component of a compounded scent (there are synthetic ambergris imitators, but they're like all synthetic perfumes -- alcohol-based, foul-smelling crap). Natural whalebone has a variety of uses (most notably in historical costuming and art) as well.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no need to hunt whales to harvest either of those things, because both of them can be collected without injuring whales in the slightest. I'm given to understand that whales "vomit" ambergris from time to time, which can collect and solidify, and often washes up on beaches in chunks. Whalebone can be gathered from whale carcasses anywhere there's a dead whale. No hunting required.

FWIW, on much the same subject, "foxhunting" is sort of fun, and a reasonable facsimile of same can be performed without harming any actual foxes. (Hounds will trace the scent of a dragged bait just as well as they will a living fox. Are foxes endangered in Britain? They're common as mud around here.)

Apparently I'm the only one here who has actually eaten whale. At a small expensive restaurant in Machida (between Tokyo and Yokohama), where I became involved in a game of "What Can We Get the Gaijin to Eat?"

A plate of sashimi was passed around, with an artfully arranged section of light beige meat, looking kind of like chicken, and an equally artfully arranged section of dark red meat. "We'll tell you what it is after you eat it."

The lighter stuff was decent, but nowhere near as good as a nice salmon or bonito sashimi, say. It turned out to be deer.

The dark stuff had almost no flavor, and the texture, while not as nasty as squid sashimi, was nothing special. Not something I would order again even if it were cheap. Turned out, and you know this already because I gave away the punch line at the start, dammit, to have been whale.

Our hosts tried to tell us our share (of the whole meal, not just the whale) was 2000 Yen, but I know enough Japanese to have caught the numbers while they were discussing the check, so I knew it was really 6000, or about 60 bucks. (Very Japanese, that, the post-docs and grad students giving large gifts to the Americans on per diem. I didn't let them get away with it.)

So let's see. Very expensive, zero flavor, boring texture, further endangerment of already endangered animals, and degradement of science. A winner all around! No, wait. The other thing.

And that was the only time I ever even heard of whale being offered at a restaurant. So yeah, I think it's gotta be a power thing more than anything else.

'... kill whalers...'

Who? When?

Please don't turn this into an "animal rights" issue.

Um, it's little late for that.

I don't have the authority to tell Greenpeace to call off their mission, but you go for it, Dustin.

Sea Shepherd ... kill[s] whalers in the name of the whales.

I think the word for that is "libel".

I wrote a massive chunk of my MA thesis in East Asian Languages and Civilizations on this very topic, so bear with me while I ramble on and on.

@#9 - There is negligible demand for whale meat, and this has always been so.

This isn't really true. Analysis of middens from the Middle Jomon period suggests that small cetaceans formed a significant portion of the diet of coastal communities. (Of course, it is sheer fallacy to imagine that there is any meaningful cultural continuity between the Jomon people and modern Japanese.) The littoral hunter-gatherer lifestyle faded out with the introduction of wet rice agriculture around the third century BC, but scattered coastal communities continued to engage in active whaling, and just about everyone would take advantage of a dead or dying whale if the opportunity arose.

The introduction of Buddhism in the fifth century gave Japanese people an additional motive to hunt whales: Buddhism holds that killing a fish is a lesser sin than killing a mammal, and whales were - you guessed it - classed as fish. (In fact, popular Japanese perception still tends to categorize whales as "basically fish" in the same way that popular American perception tends to categorize spiders as "basically insects." Maybe a decade ago, the Japanese commissioner to the International Whaling Commission accused America of trying to rob Japan of its "fish eating culture.")

The late 16th century saw a major technological advance in whaling - specifically, the use of nets to entangle whales. A few villages began specializing in whaling as a sort of proto-industry. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan embarked on an aggressive program of modernization, and Western-style whaling was very much one of the things on the list.

(Incidentally, many of the Japanese towns currently see themselves as the heirs of a "tradition of whaling" did not actually begin whaling until around the turn of the century. Taiji can lay legitimate claim to whaled continuously for centuries; other major hotbeds of pro-whaling activism, like Ayukawa and Abashiri, go on and on about their "traditions" and I think yeah, right, the ancient ways of your people that you learned a hundred years ago from the freakin' Norwegians.)

So far, I have hopefully demonstrated - albeit in a prolix, scattered fashion - that whaling did occur in Japan long before the twentieth century. However, whaling never even came close to being a cultural universally, and after the Jomon, the areas that depended heavily on whale meat were few and far between.

The first real sizable national demand for whale meat came after WW2, when Japan faced a disastrous shortage of protein (and food in general, actually). MacArthur secured permission for the Japanese to rebuild their whaling fleet, et voila - a monster was born. For the next two decades, whale comprised at least 50% of the meat eaten in Japan (bear in mind that Japan doesn't exactly have vast tracts of land on which to pasture cattle). As Japan became more affluent, whale meat - which was, after all, the meat of poverty - became a less important component of the Japanese diet.

Around the same time that the Japanese were getting rich enough to opt away from whale meat, the miserably misregulated whale stocks were nosediving. Faced with this double crisis, Japanese whaling companies decided to do what any sane corporation would do and maximize profit before the whales were all gone. (To be fair, the Soviets - by then the only other major whaling nation - behaved even more execrably than the Japanese, systematically underreporting their catch by a factor of nearly a hundred.)

At the very last second of the eleventh hour, despite strenuous Japanese opposition, the International Whaling Commission passed a moratorium on commercial whaling, set to begin in 1986. Japan began observing the moratorium a year late, and immediately shifted over to a 'scientific' whaling program, heavily underwritten by the government.

. . . This response sort of got away from itself, but to recapitulate, from Japan's prehistory all the way up to its program of modernization, demand for whale meat existed locally in various areas during various eras. The period between the Meiji Restoration and WW2 was a massive clusterfuck in a whole lot of ways, but for our purposes, suffice it to say that this is when Japan adopted modern whaling techniques, and that there was enough demand for whale meat to make the Japan's fledgling whaling companies extremely profitable.

Finally, Japan relied heavily on whale meat for the two decades after WW2, and I think this is where the real problem lies: many people in Japan today - certainly almost everyone who is old enough to be a policymaker - grew up eating whale meat.

Um, it's little late for that.
I don't have the authority to tell Greenpeace to call off their mission, but you go for it, Dustin.

Oops! I thought they were environmentalists. I guess I fell victim to their elaborate deception -- the one where they were out stopping whaling and clear cutting while PETA was busy firebombing scientists and old women. Plus, they wrote it into their mission statement and everything. But I see now that it was all a ruse -- boy, is my face red. Thanks for setting me straight on that.

"Please don't turn this into an "animal rights" issue".
Dustin, I would argue that it may not be an animal rights issue, but it is certainly an animal welfare issue. The IWC has recognized this for years and has had several meetings to address that issue i.e. to develop more humane killing methods. And I am not sure whether "animal rights/welfare" or "ecological concerns" are better motivational forces. It is my impression that people in general don't get too excited over the loss of a species unless it's cuddly and cute.

This is almost the same as calling Hiroshima, Nuclear Research.

Ooh, I'd love to see someone make that argument to the Japanese government. It's even true - one of the reasons they picked Hiroshima as the target (rather than a bigger city like, say, Tokyo or Osaka) is that Hiroshima had been relatively undamaged by conventional bombing so far and so would give a better idea of the true power of the bomb. Certainly more true than a lot of the justifications for whaling research.

On PZ's point: you don't even need to kill the animals to get tissue samples; various BAS researchers have used crossbows firing tethered sampling needles to get blood samples or tissue biopsies.

@#15: These fleets are exploiting loopholes by disguising as research... who approves the research? Why is the loophole not closed or tightened?

To make a long answer short and spare everyone another massive blog-clog, the International Whaling Commission is the body that approves the research. The IWC grudgingly approves Japanese "research" whaling for a couple of reasons:

(1)Membership in the IWC is purely voluntary. It does not have the force of international law. If Japan withdraws from the IWC, it can go slaughter every damn whale in the ocean and yes, everybody will be furious but nobody will have the legal authority to say cut that out now. Worse yet, if Japan leaves the IWC, it will most likely join the pro-whaling North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, which has set itself up as a potential rival to the IWC. In short, the anti-whaling majority of the IWC needs to placate Japan to prevent it from leaving.

(2) The anti-whaling wing of the IWC is primarily headed by the US, which needs to get its aboriginal whaling quotas (for the Inuits and the Aleuts) renewed every five years or so. If the US blocks Japan's "scientific" whaling, Japan will block the US's aboriginal whaling quotas.

(3) A few years ago, the overwhelming majority of the IWC opposed commercial whaling, but this balance of power is shifting. Japan has taken to encouraging small Central American and Caribbean countries to join IWC; if they do, these countries can then expect a sudden spike in Japanese foreign aid. Is this a dirty trick? Absolutely. Then again, Western environmental coalitions have a history of stacking the vote in the IWC in exactly the same way, albeit for a cause that I personally find much more acceptable.

Steve Alleyn wrote; "...nothing - not a SINGLE THING - warrants the killing of one human being by another."

This is, of course, wrong. There are a lot of good reasons to kill other humans. That much of the time we've got it wrong doesn't mean there aren't.

[blockquote]Please don't turn this into an "animal rights" issue.[/blockquote]
True that. I can't help but think that, if this were about animal rights, the anti-whaling ships would be going after fishing boats in the off-season.

Oops! I thought they were environmentalists.

People can be both.

while PETA was busy firebombing scientists and old women.

Careful, your agenda is showing.

I see now that it was all a ruse -- boy, is my face red. Thanks for setting me straight on that.

Don't mention it. :)

People can be both.

But the organization is not. Careful, your straw man is showing.

Careful, your agenda is showing.

Oh shit! Did I leave my facts hanging out again? You're an empty-headed fuckwit. ;)

Thank you, kurage.

Yeah, this isn't an animal rights issue; it's about a pointless slaughter of an animal in the decline, and for what?

I want to point out, though, that in some ways, we aren't much better. I'm a huge fan of our own desert southwest. What we're doing with free-range cattle, all to keep the prices in the supermarkets low, is a crime. The Argentinians are sacrificing the rainforests so they can have beef.

Now, given a choice between ending whale slaughter and halting our own wasteful cattle-raising practices produces, for me, a winner; we should stop killing whales.

Seconds after that task has been accomplished, we need to start on ending free-range cattle practices that are destroying our own heritage and the desert southwest.

Japanese denialism is really something, though. I love the Japanese culture; the art, the food (ironically), the use of technology, the pride they have in their workmanship, but the denialism they have towards dolphin and whale slaughters is perplexing. I think they save their most offensive denialism for Nanking, though. Their denialism about various atrocities regarding WW2 is just very odd and offputting.

We're a bit on the denialist side, too. Maybe there should be an annual internation conference on denialism; 9/11 denialsim, slavery denialism, whaling denialism, holocaust denialism... That'd bring us together, eh?

Another reason why subsidies are bad.

I bet a lot of Japanese taxpayers don't know that their money is going out to help kill endangered sea mammals.

As has been mentioned by another, not all kinds of whales are endangered. But people still get surprisingly emotional at the thought of hunting them. Rational or not, apparently some animals are to be considered Untouchable. In India, it's cows, in the US, it's whales.

My main feeling after reading through this entry and the comments to it is one of disillusionment. What happened to being rational and scientific? Where are the statistics and facts? Is there anything but dogma behind these sentiments? While I couldn't care less about whaling in itself (I don't eat whale meat and I don't think anybody is really dependent on it economically), the sheer irrationality of the anti-whaling movement makes me want to campaign for the other side out of sheer contrariness.

And as this is a biology blog, perhaps I can get an answer to a claim that's intrigued me since I first heard it: Is it true that whales have the same size brains as cows, relative to their body size? If so, perhaps the comparison with holy cows is truly relevant.

Finally: There is one threat to endangered sea mammals that I would be more than happy to combat in any way: Ocean pollution. But alas, polluters don't make such an easily identifiable target as the japanese... Most of them look just like you and me.

Dustin wrote; "Oh shit! Did I leave my facts hanging out again? You're an empty-headed fuckwit.

The linked article said it was ALF, not PETA, who was responsible for the (failed) firebombing. I don't necessarily disagree with your position, Dustin, just wondering if you linked the wrong article or if it is my knowledge of the difference between ALF and PETA that is wrong (the latter is a very real possibility).

Why shouldn't this be an "animal rights" issue? PETA doesn't own the term.

I'm just listening to talk-back radio over breakfast, and a caller just said to the host - "If they don't stop whaling, we should go to Japan and kill all their pandas."

Is there, by chance, a Capt. Ahab in the Japanese ranks?

Seriously, who would kill Migaloo?

As has been mentioned by another, not all kinds of whales are endangered. But people still get surprisingly emotional at the thought of hunting them.

Fin whales and humpbacks are endangered.

My main feeling after reading through this entry and the comments to it is one of disillusionment. What happened to being rational and scientific? Where are the statistics and facts? Is there anything but dogma behind these sentiments?

It is rational to cry foul when someone tries to claim science to exploit a loophole. As for the statistics on whether fins and humpbacks are endangered, they're all over the place, and you're either being lazy or disingenuous.

The sheer irrationality of the anti-whaling movement makes me want to campaign for the other side out of sheer contrariness.

Well, at least you've admitted that you're a troll.

There is one threat to endangered sea mammals that I would be more than happy to combat in any way: Ocean pollution. But alas, polluters don't make such an easily identifiable target as the japanese... Most of them look just like you and me.

Of all the things in the ocean which are endangered, the Red Herring is, sadly, not among them. Go crawl back under your rock.

The way to get the Japanese to stop whaling is to pointedly link their whaling fleets to MacArthur and American control of post-WW2 Japan.

No nation likes keeping around reminders of their subjugation by another nation, and if America and the world makes the link clear, the Japanese will quietly disband the last of the whaling fleet.

Ahab wrote; "Is it true that whales have the same size brains as cows, relative to their body size?

No. In any event "whales" is an overly broad term. Some whales have brain/body size ratios (but not brain/body weight ratios) greater than humans. So do elephants. Some have smaller ratios. All have bigger ratios than cows.

I would also remind the troll that a whale got the best of Ahab.

During the last cruise when the factory ship caught fire it was possible it may have to make the closest landfall, which would have been New Zealand. The NZ media at the time pointed out that this would result in the impounding of the boat and the catch under NZ law. Hence why it didn't happen and hence why Greenpeace offered them a tow...

Sorry, but you can find plenty of articles on Greenpeace, PETA *and* ALF that show that they are fundamentally similar in their real ideologies. The difference seems to be that Greenpeace only sinks boats, ALF fire bombs, and PETA just uses its money to pay off the families of fire bombers, sort of like Iran and some other places do for suicide bombers.

However, it might be interesting to note that the man who **founded** Greenpeace jumped ship to become a forest ranger, because, "I realized that I could do more good working with people to solve the problem than against them, and my organization was being hijacked by people with very different agendas than I originally had." And that in and of itself should tell you something.

Yeah, the press releases from many of these groups claim a lot of things, but you have to look at the words and actions of the people **in charge** to get the real picture. Greenpeace's leadership are now complete wackos, and PETA's have been disconnected from reality from day one. Why else would 100% of their top people make statements like, "Owning a pet is no different than slavery.", or, "Animal labs and places like animal shelters are just like Nazi concentration camps", or the real doozy, "Violence is simply a different tactic, no different or morally unacceptable than any other when you are trying to change things."

I don't get why, when there are thousands of *rational* groups that use reasonable tactics and sane tactics to try to change things for the better, people *insist* on defending the practices of groups that are ***known*** for acting irrationally and unethically, while believing that they didn't do anything at all wrong. Yes, they are the most obvious and largest groups in the world. So what? So was Stalins version of Communism. It doesn't make them moral, ethical or defensible.

Do you have any evidence that Greenpeace has ever sunk a boat?

I don't recall them doing that.

I recall the French sinking one of Greenpiece's boats.

Is it true that whales have the same size brains as cows, relative to their body size?

Nope. Same as chimps and humans, once you correct for the dependence of the ratio on the absolute body size.

And what is this talk of "not all whales are endangered"? All baleen whales are endangered to varying degrees, as is the sperm whale.

You're right about the pollution, however. This is an additional issue. Problems tend to add up rather than canceling out, you know...

>Sea Shepherd

You can look this stuff up. Don't believe lies.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/07/117871.php

"Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson ... claims to have sunk a dozen whaling vessels, in ports ... "decommissioned alongside the docks".

Captain Cornelissen disputed that the group's tactics could kill whalers and even sink ships. "We've been doing this for 29 years . . . Sea Shepherd has never killed or injured a single person, on our side or the other side," he said.

"We're not there to hurt people, we're there to shut them down, to stop their operation...."

@55 Kagehi

Can we have some sources for the quotes you've posted which attribute them to Greenpeace? Some of them seem to have come from PETA and the Animal Liberation Front (which are serious wackos btw.), but nothing I've found connects that to Greenpeace.

In pursuing our mission, we have no permanent allies or enemies. We promote open, informed debate about society's environmental choices. We use research, lobbying, and quiet diplomacy to pursue our goals, as well as high-profile, non-violent conflict to raise the level and quality of public debate.

From the Greenpeace website. Nothing about violence there of course. ;)

Do you have any sources that show that Greenpeace has advocated or done violence against anything?

If not, I have to call you a troll.

"Note the big "RESEARCH" stenciled across the hull."
If the Pentagon see this, they'll start stencilling "LOVE" on the side of tanks.

No, that's stenciled on the walls of the interrogation rooms at Gitmo. Along with "MINISTRY OF".

Responding to this:

There is one threat to endangered sea mammals that I would be more than happy to combat in any way: Ocean pollution. But alas, polluters don't make such an easily identifiable target as the japanese... Most of them look just like you and me.

Dustin (#51) said:

Of all the things in the ocean which are endangered, the Red Herring is, sadly, not among them. Go crawl back under your rock.

My question to Dustin is this: when did ocean pollution not become a problem? Did I miss it?

Wikipedia has a table of statuses, which I'm not sure includes "completely safe", though I note dolphins generally aren't on it. But certainly there are categories of concern not as intense as the official endangered level, populated by many baleen whales and sperm whales. Even famous baleens, like humpbacks and some blue populations.

I'd note that naively, annually culling 0.1% of any population seems like it should be safe; a species with a lifespan of less than 100% years should be seeing birth and death rates over 1%.

a species with a lifespan of less than 100[...] years should be seeing birth and death rates over 1%.

Right whales can get at least 211 years old. Yes, two hundred eleven, as determined from the amino acid racemization in the eye lens of a killed one.

Omura's whale is missing from the Wikipedia list because its conservation status has never been evaluated. Given the fact that only nine individuals are known, all dead, I don't see any reason for optimism.

Commercial whaling in Japan is like prayer in schools in the USA: those promoting it are willing to lie openly about what they want and why they want whaling/prayer, while passionately denouncing those who oppose their real goals. However, they do not expect anyone to actually believe a word of it, seeking to convert (or bully) rather than persuade, since evidence in no way supports anything they claim.

My question to Dustin is this: when did ocean pollution not become a problem? Did I miss it?

Ocean pollution is a problem.

It is also, as any schoolchild should understand, beside the point of, and being deployed in a disingenous attempt to derail, this discussion.

What irks me about this is that people are falling over themselves to save the whales, yet nothing is being done to stop the harvesting of Krill.
I know that Krill aren't endangered but you have to question why we are even taking Krill.

The thing that had prevented large catches of Krill was there wasn't an effective way to process the catch, this has recently changed and the Krill catch quota has been increased.

Little if anything is being done about this, for instance the Greenpeace website, where you would expect some form of action, has nothing about the recent raise in Quotas and in fact if you do a search for Krill you get 12 hits and for whales 620 (they aren't alone in the ratio of Krill to Whale stories the timesonline 54 Krill, 1581 Whale), yet what is the more important species for biodiversity?

I assume that people will accuse me of taking the "debate" off topic, but remember if their aren't any Krill there aren't any Whales and isn't this the reason why people are trying to stop the Whale "research" to protect an endangered species?

>My question to Dustin is this: when did ocean pollution not become a problem? Did I miss it?
Ocean pollution is a problem.

It is also, as any schoolchild should understand, beside the point of, and being deployed in a disingenous attempt to derail, this discussion.

Don't forget trying to paint anyone who criticizes a Japanese policy as doing so because they "don't look like you and me."

And to think that kurage tried to divert us from a long crapfest! Good try!

Quote #1: Please don't turn this into an "animal rights" issue.

Response #1:
True that. I can't help but think that, if this were about animal rights, the anti-whaling ships would be going after fishing boats in the off-season.

Sea Shepard does. Poachers. Non poachers. Drift netters. Bottom trawlers. Long lines.

I assume that people will accuse me of taking the "debate" off topic, but remember if their aren't any Krill there aren't any Whales and isn't this the reason why people are trying to stop the Whale "research" to protect an endangered species?

...do you have any sources to indicate that "there aren't any krill" is a realistic outcome of present harvesting practices? Otherwise, you're comparing pomegranates (who do I have to threaten to make stores around here start carrying those reliably, anyway?) and oranges.

At the risk of sounding nutty, the argument that human life is somehow more precious than cetacean life seems to be an emotional, rather than a logical, one. There are over six billion humans on the planet, and we could easily perform the only function that distinguishes us from other species, i.e., collecting and analysing data in order to preserve a history of knowledge of our universe (long view, here, real long view), with half of that population. With whales (at least some species), there is a real danger that even minor harvesting could tip the harvested species to extinction, thus eliminating a vast store of potential knowledge.
Seems counter-productive to not kill whalers (toungue in cheek, only trying to counter the argument that every individual human is worth any amount of collateral damage to the biosphere).

Japan also started fingerprinting all non-Japanese at their borders from yesterday, including permanent residents like myself. The current government is full of xenophobic right-wing looneys who claim that demands to end whaling is "cultural imperialism".
BTW, whale meat tastes like liver.

Apparently I'm the only one here who has actually eaten whale.

Bad assumption. Muqtuq (whale blubber) is a delicacy where I live in the Canadian Arctic. Can't stand the taste of it, myself.

I know much less about the Japanese culture than I wish, but doesn't the Japanese Shinto religion teach that you should respect nature? I am normally opposed to promoting religion, but I think in this case this specific religious value would be good for the Japanese to remember.

I have no problem with killing thriving, healthy populations of whales. The only people who can oppose the killing of whales are vegetarians. Killing whales from thriving populations that spend their lives in the sea is a very environmentally sustainable thing to do. Much more sustainable than farmed beef, pork, chicken, salmon, etc. The reason I mention this is because there was a tribe of Makah indians in the pacific northwest that wanted to hunt about 10 grey whales a year, as they had traditionally done. The grey whale population in this area is thriving and some say overpopulated, because they had been traditionally hunted by indians and now they weren't. The environmental scientists had looked at populations statistics and found the sustainable catch levels and gave the indians the go ahead. Several animal rights groups protested and I couldn't disagree with them more. Besides the answer that, "whales are cute", there is no justification for this, when thousands of other animals are slaughtered in small enclosures every day for food.

Having said that, I am adamantly opposed to the killing of whales with dwindling populations. Whale harvests need to go through a rigorous population analysis taking in to count their age at reproduction and their population sizes, as do most sustainable fisheries. It doesn't seem like Japan is doing that.

I have no problem with killing thriving, healthy populations of whales.

Uh, what species of whales currently has a "thriving, healthy population?"

Quite a few, I listed the eastern pacific gray whale population in my post, if you would have read it. A previous poster put up statistics from wikipedia on whale populations. News reports usually only discuss the rare and endangered whales (of which there are a disturbingly large number), for obvious reasons, but there are some populations that aren't in danger. I was living in the pacific northwest, minoring in Fisheries when the controversy over the Makah indians was happening. My professor at the time, felt that the indians hunting the gray whales was going to be entirely sustainable. In my view, it is much more sustainable and humane to eat "wild food". This isn't always possible though. But what the Japanese are doing to endangered populations is not justifiable because the populations they are hunting are at risk.

"You sometimes get the feeling that whaling nations - being few - are easier targets than say pork, beef or mutton eating nations."

One difference is that pork, beef, and mutton are bred under observation, in captivity. So we can easily balance population against consumption. We don't have that kind of control over whale populations, any more than we have control over tuna populations, which are being decimated by overfishing.

Futhermore, pigs, cows, and sheep reproduce and mature quite a bit faster than whales.

As I see it, killing whales is no more morally reprehensible than killing cows, either both are or neither (and I can respect that view that both are)... as long as we are not putting species in danger, which we sadly seem to be doing. How long it takes them to reproduce doesn't really matter though, the hunting is either sustainable (good) or it isn't (bad) and reproduction factors into that automatically.

You sometimes hear the arguments that certain species of whale "may be endangered on a global scale, but not in our waters" but that always gets me wondering about the gigantic fence there seemingly must be around our waters.

I'm an Icelander myself and I wouldn't say no to a nice, grilled whale steak with a cold Carlsberg. And yet I am against whaling, mainly for 3 reasons:

1. If a species of whale (or any animal) can't support sustainable hunting, we shouldn't hunt them. But that leaves the species which aren't endangered.

2. The fact that we don't seem to be able kill them even remotely humanely certainly speaks against the practice, we can eat other animals and cause less suffering.

3. There isn't a market for the meat. Killing for no reason is simply sadistic. This for me is the end-all argument. I'd eat a Free-Willy hamburger with relish but since people aren't buying them, there's no reason to sell them. And the scientific hunting seems awfully suspect.

ps. Please don't make excuses for Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd fuckwits, at least in Iceland we still remember the sinking of 2 whaling vessels in 1986, and these were active vessels that could easily have had men on board. Watson may deny his responsibility now (after being held for questioning and told he faced years in jail) but he certainly said he did it back then.

"There isn't a market for the meat. Killing for no reason is simply sadistic. "

I don't put much weight on the market existence argument. After all, there's a market for rhinoceros horn aphrodisiac, too. All it takes for a market to exist is for a few rich people to be willing to spend a lot of money for a status symbol.

It doesn't take much of a market to create enough demand to wipe out a species.

Um, that boat has Korean written on it, not Japanese.

"I don't put much weight on the market existence argument. After all, there's a market for rhinoceros horn aphrodisiac, too. All it takes for a market to exist is for a few rich people to be willing to spend a lot of money for a status symbol.

It doesn't take much of a market to create enough demand to wipe out a species."

Ah, but when, like me, you don't see anything more morally wrong with hunting whales that aren't endangered than with hunting deer, the market existence argument becomes essential... If that is taken out of the picture, you can hunt all the non-endangered whales you want for all I care, as long as the species can support it (although I am oversimplifying here, the brutal hunting methods go a long way to making the hunting unjustifiable).

Like you mention, it's completely superfluous if said hunting is putting the species in danger, but if it isn't, then I need it!

Is it true that whales have the same size brains as cows, relative to their body size?

Nope. Same as chimps and humans, once you correct for the dependence of the ratio on the absolute body size.

And what is this talk of "not all whales are endangered"? All baleen whales are endangered to varying degrees, as is the sperm whale.

You're right about the pollution, however. This is an additional issue. Problems tend to add up rather than canceling out, you know...

a species with a lifespan of less than 100[...] years should be seeing birth and death rates over 1%.

Right whales can get at least 211 years old. Yes, two hundred eleven, as determined from the amino acid racemization in the eye lens of a killed one.

Omura's whale is missing from the Wikipedia list because its conservation status has never been evaluated. Given the fact that only nine individuals are known, all dead, I don't see any reason for optimism.

As I see it, killing whales is no more morally reprehensible than killing cows, either both are or neither (and I can respect that view that both are)... as long as we are not putting species in danger, which we sadly seem to be doing. How long it takes them to reproduce doesn't really matter though, the hunting is either sustainable (good) or it isn't (bad) and reproduction factors into that automatically.

You sometimes hear the arguments that certain species of whale "may be endangered on a global scale, but not in our waters" but that always gets me wondering about the gigantic fence there seemingly must be around our waters.

I'm an Icelander myself and I wouldn't say no to a nice, grilled whale steak with a cold Carlsberg. And yet I am against whaling, mainly for 3 reasons:

1. If a species of whale (or any animal) can't support sustainable hunting, we shouldn't hunt them. But that leaves the species which aren't endangered.

2. The fact that we don't seem to be able kill them even remotely humanely certainly speaks against the practice, we can eat other animals and cause less suffering.

3. There isn't a market for the meat. Killing for no reason is simply sadistic. This for me is the end-all argument. I'd eat a Free-Willy hamburger with relish but since people aren't buying them, there's no reason to sell them. And the scientific hunting seems awfully suspect.

ps. Please don't make excuses for Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd fuckwits, at least in Iceland we still remember the sinking of 2 whaling vessels in 1986, and these were active vessels that could easily have had men on board. Watson may deny his responsibility now (after being held for questioning and told he faced years in jail) but he certainly said he did it back then.

"I don't put much weight on the market existence argument. After all, there's a market for rhinoceros horn aphrodisiac, too. All it takes for a market to exist is for a few rich people to be willing to spend a lot of money for a status symbol.

It doesn't take much of a market to create enough demand to wipe out a species."

Ah, but when, like me, you don't see anything more morally wrong with hunting whales that aren't endangered than with hunting deer, the market existence argument becomes essential... If that is taken out of the picture, you can hunt all the non-endangered whales you want for all I care, as long as the species can support it (although I am oversimplifying here, the brutal hunting methods go a long way to making the hunting unjustifiable).

Like you mention, it's completely superfluous if said hunting is putting the species in danger, but if it isn't, then I need it!