Japan fleet sets off to hunt humpbacks

So I’m at work and I’m reading this article on Yahoo. The title of the article says it all. “Japan fleet sets off to hunt humpbacks”. Reading this makes me so angry and everything. I’ve copied the article and highlighted what I felt were the more important or nonsensical information.




SHIMONOSEKI, Japan - A Japanese whaling fleet sailing toward waters off Antarctica to kill protected humpback whales was itself the target of a hunt Monday by environmental activists who vowed to disrupt the expedition.

Greenpeace said its protest ship Esperanza was searching for the fleet south of Japanese territorial waters and would shadow the ships to the South Pacific to try to reduce their catch.

"It's a large ocean, but we're going to track them down," expedition member Dave Walsh told The Associated Press by telephone Monday.

The Japanese fleet was embarking on the country's largest whaling expedition, targeting protected humpbacks for the first time since the 1960s. In a farewell ceremony Sunday for the four-ship expedition, officials told a crowd at the southern Japanese port of Shimonoseki that Japan should preserve its whale-eating culture.

"They're violent environmental terrorists," mission leader Hajime Ishikawa said. "Their violence is unforgivable ... We must fight against their hypocrisy and lies."

Families waved little flags emblazoned with smiling whales and the crew raised a toast with cans of beer, while a brass band played "Popeye the Sailor Man."

The whalers plan to kill up to 50 humpbacks in what is believed to be the first large-scale hunt for the once nearly extinct species since a 1963 moratorium in the Southern Pacific put the giant marine mammals under international protection.

The mission also aims to take as many as 935 minke whales and up to 50 fin whales in what Japan's Fisheries Agency says is its largest-ever scientific whale hunt. The expedition lasts through April.

Japan says it needs to kill the animals in order to conduct research on their reproductive and feeding patterns.

While scientific whale hunts are allowed by the International Whaling Commission, or IWC, critics say Japan is simply using science as a cover for commercial whaling.

Ken Findlay, a whale biologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said the humpback population was recovering but said he was worried Japan would kill whales from vulnerable breeding grounds like those off New Zealand.

He also said Japan's hunting methods were unnecessarily cruel. Japanese whalers sometimes chase wounded animals for hours, he said.

"I don't think firing a harpoon at a whale and then dragging it next to the ship is ethical," Findlay said. "You question the necessity of that. It's not research."

An IWC moratorium on commercial whaling took effect in 1986, but Japan — where coastal villages have hunted whales for hundreds of years — has killed almost 10,500 mostly minke and Brydes whales under research permits since then. Tokyo has argued unsuccessfully for years for the IWC to overturn the moratorium.

The Japanese hunt, which puts meat from the whales on the commercial market, is growing rapidly despite an increasingly vocal anti-whaling movement. This winter season's target of up to 1,035 whales is more than double the number the country hunted a decade ago.
Japan argues that it should have the right to hunt whales as long as they are not in danger of extinction.

The American Cetacean Society estimates the humpback population has recovered to about 30,000-40,000 — about a third of the number before modern whaling. The species is listed as "vulnerable" by the World Conservation Union.





Where do I even begin? At the port, officials told the crowd that they should preserve their whale eating culture. Then they went on to claim that they are doing this SCIENTIFIC whale hunt to research on their breeding & feeding patterns? How contradicting... Do you even need 50 Humpbacks for this SCIENTIFIC research then?

And people were carrying flags of smiling whales in support of this hunt at the port. I for some odd reason feel that the whales are the last ones to smile. Who the hell thought of putting a picture of a smiling whale on a flag as a way to support this hunt? Is it a way to make themselves feel better when eating the whale? Thinking that the whale wanted to be chopped up into millions of pieces then placed into the mouth us humans and be chewed up?

They said that the numbers of these whales have climbed up, therefore, it's safe to hunt them once again. Does this mean that the whales ALWAYS have to be on the endangered list? It took DECADES to get the humpback whales out of the endangered category and into the vulnerable category. But i dont' think the primary reason for doing so was so that the Japanese Whalers can hunt them and bring them back into the endangered species category again.

I remember seeing a footage of the Japanese whalers killing pilot whales in the sea. The water around them was bloodshot red, and there were newborn babies among them. The actress in Heroes Hayden Panettiere (Claire Bennet) was there with a group of other enviromentalist to stop the slaughtering, but she was hit with a paddle during the process, and all the whales were not saved. Including the damn baby.