"the cruelty behind whaling has become obscured in recent years by abstract arguments over population statistics. The fact is that, whether it is one whale or a thousand, whaling is simply wrong on cruelty grounds alone".
Whaling was banned in 1986.
Japan still kills around 40,000 whales and dolphins each year intentionally and around another 100,000 as bycatch in other fisheries.
Doesn't sound like a zero catch as the law says to me.
link
Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, à la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the golden rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one's own station, more palpable—the feeling that "there but for fortune go I"
In 1973 the “Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species” (CITES) was ratified by 121 countries.
Those animals that are protected by CITES can be found here
and all baleen whales are included under this protection.
Minke, Fin whale, Sei, Humpback....
Japan, Norway and Iceland betray a 121 nation strong treaty with absolutely no fear of punishment. It is a disgrace.
Donate to Sea Shepherd and make your stand as a decent citizen on this planet. Only they have acted under the UN mandate to defend the whales.
Scroll down to where it says 're-afirming'
The taking of marine animals from international waters is counted as international trade.
Is Japan is using loop holes to get through all of the treaties, laws and agreements setup to protect whales? If so, is she going against the SPIRIT of the ban.
Catch limit of protected stock great whales = 0
Japan caught = 1000
Something is going wrong here.
Jan 16, 2008 7:34am AEDT
Australia's Federal Court has ordered a Japanese whaling company to stop killing whales in Australian Antarctic waters. The ruling follows a case brought by Humane Society International, which alleged the Japanese firm Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha killed more than 1,200 minke and nine fin whales in Antarctic waters since the Australian Whale Sanctuary was established seven years ago. The court has no jurisdiction outside Australia, so enforcing its injunction on whaling won't be easy. But the Humane Society says the ruling may bolster Australian government's efforts to have whaling outlawed by an international court.
Whale scientists world wide demand a change to this betrayal of science.
<1>
All the IWC scientific commitee needs to make a choice on whaling is reliable population statistics and population trend data. Japan has never been able to provide it and all the stats we have document only a massive decline in Minke numbers. The scientific commitee NEVER asked for age data, it wants to know how many whales there are, not how old the ones Japan has already killed were. Its like building a coal powered power station to study global warming, or fighting for peace! Lethal age data collecting is simply not needed for the RMP. Age data is a smokescreen, an incredibly cruel and nasty smokescreen that leads to Japanese whalers gut shooting the most impressive animals left on the planet. This is not how a responsible hunter acts.
<2>
The Southern Ocean hunt takes place in the special feeding grounds. This is where whales from all around the world gather just off the coast of Antarctica to chase krill concentrations. There is a VERY good reason this feeding/breeding area was made into a sanctuary! It is the one place ALL the whales have to go each year. It is like hunting beside the only waterhole for thousands of miles. Animals HAVE to show up. You can effectively kill EVERY single one. No matter how rare a whale species becomes ever year it will be at that same spot in the Southern Ocean to feed. The fact the Minke whale population fell by two thirds didn't worry the whalers one bit because they knew no matter how rare all the whales would be in the one area anyway. This is not how a responsible hunter acts.
<3>
Whales face additional pressures as well as hunting. There is significant bycatch of cetaceans in fisheries around the world and threats such as climate change, the use of sonar by defence forces and seismic testing by the oil and gas industries all loom large. The plastics problem is so large it is almost impossible to visualise. So we have a species attempting to recover from massive over hunting, in most cases due to new threats in modern oceans and very low birthrates there is minimal population recovery. So to restart hunting whales, its just kicking the species while its down. This is not how a responsible hunter acts!
<4>
Getting the whales protected was a massive effort that started out with the whaling nation leaders themselves talking about how they could make sure they didnt wipe out whales chasing the oil. It has slowly evolved through much hard work to the protection we have today. If whaling had not been banned we would not have the species will still have today. It really is very insensitive and rude that the Japanese whalers would be able to destroy all of the good results from the hard work of people bringing the whales back from the brink of extinction. We know the whalers lied every chance they got, the biggest offender was Soviet Russia and the market for most of their meat sales was Japan. Because of the USSR's illegal and secret whaling to supply the Japanese market, the humpback whale, is still rare on NZ and Australian coastlines today!
<5>
Whalers cannot be trusted, the protection of protected animals in protected areas has now fallen on the people of this planet.
It needs to be borne in mind that whales occupy a unique political status. No other living resource on earth is under the same kind of multi-national rule as whales are. Since the signing of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in 1946, it has been determined and recognized that whales are an international resource, not a national one. They come under the global jurisdiction of the Commission established by the treaty to conserve and manage them, and they are not subject to any individual country's arbitrary, unilateral use. Unlike land animals, they dwell and migrate in open seas as part of the "common heritage" of all humankind. Rather than being thrown away for nothing, they should be value added and kept alive!
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