Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

George Orwell would have understood the silliness of the Japanese Institute for Cetacean Research. Using the word “research” to justify a commercial slaughter of endangered and protected whales is very Orwellian.

And of course in the tradition of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the media releases of the ICR simply reverse the facts. When a Japanese whaler rams a Sea Shepherd ship they simply report it as the Sea Shepherd ship ramming a Japanese whaler, and when the whalers attack Sea Shepherd, the ICR simply reports it as an attack by Sea Shepherd on the whalers.

In the wake of yesterday’s deliberate ramming of the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker by the Japanese whaling ship Shonan Maru 2, the ICR predictably issued a media release entitled “Anti-whaling ship Bob Barker Attacks the Nisshin Maru.”

Well, since these guys describe themselves as scientists, I would like to provide some scientific facts to counter their propaganda.

The first fact is that it is not technically possible for the Sea Shepherd ships Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin to attack or ram a Japanese harpoon vessel. The reasons are simple: every ship in the Japanese fleet except the Nisshin Maru is faster and more manoeuvrable that the two Sea Shepherd ships. The top speed of the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker is around 17 to 18 knots. The top speed of all three Yushin Maru vessels and the Shonan Maru 2 is 22 knots.  These harpoon vessels can catch the Sea Shepherd vessels but the Sea Shepherd vessels cannot catch them.

Only our vessel the Ady Gil was capable of superior speeds and the Shonan Maru 2 neutralized the Ady Gil by ramming it while it was stationary in the water, splitting it in two, and destroying it.

Our ships can match the speed of the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru, and this is the vessel we interfere with. We have never rammed it, and it would be suicide to attempt to ram it because what the Nisshin Maru lacks in speed it more than makes up with size, being some ten times larger and heavier than the Steve Irwin or the Bob Barker.

Below is the latest media release by the ICR. It is interesting that they did not release any video of the collision yesterday with the Bob Barker. Our video clearly shows the Yushin Maru 3 as the vessel responsible for the ramming.

But despite this the ICR issued the following release to which I will add my commentary:

Anti-whaling ship Bob Barker attacks the Nisshin Maru

The Japanese Antarctic whale research mother ship Nisshin Maru was subject to attack today by the Bob Barker, a Togo-registered antiwhaling vessel. The Bob Barker has been approaching abnormally and shooting a high-power green laser device against the Nisshin Maru crew.

Captain Paul Watson: The Bob Barker in accordance with my instructions positioned themselves directly behind the Nisshin Maru to block all whaling activities. The Nisshin Maru responded with water cannons and LRAD’s (Long Range Acoustical Devices). The Bob Barker crew retaliated with stink bombs and photonic disrupters to discourage the water cannon operators

The Nisshin Maru had been drifting overnight in preparation for the next morning’s research when, around 0140JST 6 February, the Bob Barker appeared in the vicinity. As an avoidance of danger measure, the Nisshin Maru and other research vessels immediately started moving.

Captain Paul Watson: The Bob Barker located the Nisshin Maru from a trail of offal being dumped by the factory ship. Floating chinks of blubber, bloated intestines, and blood led the Bob Barker to that floating abattoir. It is amusing that the Japanese refer to their slaughter as research.

However, the Bob Barker kept approaching from the Nisshin Maru stern coming dangerously close up to a few dozen meters. The Bob Barker has been repeatedly firing a high-power green laser device against the Nisshin Maru crew.

Captain Paul Watson: The four harpoon vessels circled the Bob Barker at close quarters until the Yushin Maru 3 came alarmingly close and then struck the Bob Barker ripping a one meter gash into the hull. Sea Shepherd admits to deploying photonic disrupters to defend themselves from attacks by the whalers.

The attack was still ongoing at 1200JST. Neither injuries to the Japanese crew nor damage to the Nisshin Maru have been reported from the Bob Barker attack.

Captain Paul Watson: At least they are honest in this respect. Sea Shepherd has never caused a single injury to any person in our history and we don’t intend to.

The Bob Barker had abandoned and left adrift the fuel-leaking Ady Gil, a New Zealand-registered watercraft that was disabled in a 6 January collision with the research vessel Shonan Maru No. 2.

Captain Paul Watson: This paragraph is priceless. The Shonan Maru 2 deliberately rams and sinks our vessel Ady Gil and they then accuse us of leaking fuel into the sea. As it was, not a drop of fuel was spilled no thanks to the whalers. The ramming split open the main fuel tank that was fortunately empty at the time. The Ady Gil had only 200 litres of fuel in its 12,000 litre capacity tanks. The ship was about to depart to refuel from the Steve Irwin when it was struck. The Bob Barker and the Ady Gil crew then removed the remaining fuel and oil lubricants before the vessel sank.

Although the Shonan Maru No. 2 had been monitoring the Bob Barker activities, the antiwhaling ship disappeared on 19 January after taking refuge in Heard Island’s Australian territorial waters.

Captain Paul Watson: The Bob Barker did indeed lose the tail of the faster Shonan Maru 2 by entering the territorial waters of Australia’s Heard Island. The Japanese whalers are legally prohibited from entering Australian waters, which is certainly an indication of their criminal activity.

Thereafter the Bob Barker met the Dutch-registered Steve Irwin within the French territorial waters of the Kerguelen Islands to transfer the Ady Gil crew and receive fuel and water from the Dutch vessel.

Captain Paul Watson: The whalers are also not allowed into French Territorial waters. It is interesting that the Japanese continue to insist their activities are legal when the nations of France and Australia disallow them to enter their waters. Sea Shepherd ships may freely enter Australian and French territorial waters but the Japanese ships cannot legally do so. That fact in itself establishes the legitimacy of Sea Shepherd actions and the illegitimacy of the Japanese actions.

After making a refuelling port call on 28 January, the Dutch vessel left from Fremantle, Australia on the 30th and is sailing toward the JARPA II research area. The Japanese Antarctic whale research vessels are making efforts to shake off the Bob Barker.

Captain Paul Watson: The Japanese security forces are becoming increasingly violent in their efforts to “shake off” our ships from their tail. We intend to stick to the Nisshin Maru like glue and if they attempt to load dead whales there will be collision but only if the harpoon vessels make the decision to initiate confrontations with Sea Shepherd ships.

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

Hey Finance Minister dudes, like, welcome to Canada, eh.

We have quite the venue for you all this year, hope you all have some really warm clothing because we’ve decided to teach all you bleeding heart Europeans a little lesson in Canadian culture.

Just a little payback for voting to ban imports of our baby seal pelts. You guys cost our wonderful sealing industry a whole two million dollars last year. But hey, it’s not the money, we’re Canadians eh and bashing in the brains of defenseless seal pups is a very important part of our national heritage.

Inhumane, you say! Nonsense, our Department of Fisheries and Oceans has assured us that the Canadian commercial seal hunt is the most well regulated, most humane slaughter of any animal in the world - so there!

Have I seen it? No, but I don’t have to the DFO has said it’s humane so it must be humane.

So here’s what you’re going to do: You’re going to leave your comfortable little homes in Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, and Washington D.C. to fly to Canada where we will put you on a long flight to Iqaluit in Nunavut. Oh, you’ve never heard of it. You have now!

Nice little place with about 6,000 people, most of whom don’t like Europeans much. Not sure if we have accommodations for everyone but if we run out of rooms, the locals can teach you how to build an igloo.

Oh, did we mention that the temperature is around -40 degrees Celsius this time of year? Not to worry- we have some really swell seal skin parkas and gloves for you to wear. What? You don’t want to wear sealskin? Well suit yourself, but we’re betting that after a few minutes shivering in the snow, you’ll be putting on those parkas for a good old photo opportunity to show the world how much you appreciate your sealskin coat.

Oh by the way, the good news is there won’t be any pesky protesters at this year’s meeting. Even the protesters have the good sense to stay out of these temperatures and conditions. Don’t let the sight of men with rifles and sharp knives worry you however. The residents around here carry rifles and wear knives all the time. Where do you think that coat we gave you came from? Oh did we mention they don’t like Europeans? Try not to say much, just smile for the cameras, and shake everyone’s hand, and if they offer you a hunk of raw seal meat to eat, our advice is you should probably eat it. These seal hunters don’t have much of a sense of humor. Hell, if you lived here all year round you would not be in the most cheerful mood either. And besides if our Governor General can eat a raw seal heart on national television, you can show the people back home that you can eat anything she can eat.

Oh sorry, you won’t be able to speak with your family or the media back home. We’re sorry, but cell phone reception up here is pretty much non-existent.

So here’s what we have planned: The meeting place will have seal skin covered chairs and we will be serving seal meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We have gifts of sealskin products for you and a little seal jerky as a midday snack. We also have a planned outdoor excursion. You will each be able to take a dogsled trip out of town to shoot a seal yourself - talk about a super fun time eh?

What’s that? One of those seal lovers told you that the commercial seal hunt has nothing to do with the Inuit in the High North. They told you that 95% of the seals are killed by white Newfoundlanders and a few inbred rednecks in the Magdalen Islands.

Well that might be true, but here in Canada us seal killer’s stick together and white hunters have been exploiting our Inuit for so damn long, it has become a tradition. Hell, the average Inuit sealer would feel downright un-Canadian if he didn’t try to defend the baby seal bashers of Newfoundland.

I’m sure it will be a wonderful event this year. We may not get around to solving the world’s financial crisis, but you will all have the opportunity to bail out our two million dollar sealing industry, and in so doing you will be striking a blow for Canadian pride.

Oh, and you simply can’t leave without trying the seal penis tea. Available only in Canada you say? Oh what a pity!

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

There is no other nation on the planet more associated with clubbing defenseless animals than Canada. Despite signs saying “baby on board the ice floes,” hundreds of uneducated East coast darlings of the public dole have this perverse fetish to inflict brutality on baby animals, most notably the baby harp seals.

Next month this pathetic group of sadistic pedophagophiles will troop to the ice at taxpayer expense to once again crush the skulls of helpless infant seals. There really is no market for sealskins or seal meat but the knuckle draggers from the Maganderthal Islands of Quebec and the archaic outposts of Newfie-land are desperate to satisfy their perverse lust to slaughter the helpless.

There are few animals on the planet as helpless and trusting as baby harp seals. Anyone can walk up to them, pet them, tickle them, photograph them, or bash in their brains and skin them alive.

And there are few men more brutally insensitive and more cowardly than the ignorant goons who torment them every spring.

The slaughter is so abhorrent that those who practice it indulge in disturbing rituals like drinking the blood from the still beating hearts of the first baby seal they kill, after which they then smear a crucifix in blood on their foreheads. They call it the “rites of spring,” and seem to take a bizarre pride in being cold-blooded killers of innocent and helpless creatures.

For sport, these fine examples of Canadian manhood decapitate a seal pup and then they use the bodies of four pups as goal posts in a game they call “head hockey” where they use a baby seals bloody head as a puck.

Of course they justify their bizarre behavior in the name of culture, but then so do the cannibals of Borneo, the cock-fighters of Hawaii, or the strange men who circumcise women in Ethiopia. Anything goes it seems if you tag the words “culture” or “tradition” to it.

Even more bizarre is the sealers insistence that they no longer kill baby seals. They stopped killing baby seals when they changed the definition of what a baby seal is: a seal over the age of three weeks.

The seal may be losing its white hair but it is still helpless on the ice, still suckling milk, and still has not learned how to swim.  They may be helpless seal pups but the Canadian government solved the problem by officially designating baby seals as adults.

And even if they were actually adults, the annual massacre of 325,000 seals has no place in the 21st Century.

But Canadian politicians just can’t let it go. They refuse to accept that in the 21st Century industries like whaling, seal killing, forest destroying, fish extermination, and beaver bashing no longer have a place in civilized society.

It’s downright embarrassing being a Canadian these days. Sure, we’re hosting the Winter Olympics, although we had to destroy thousands of trees and blow up a few mountains to build it so the world would come only to find a shortage of snow. The Harper government overlooked one thing in their on-going denial of global warming: lack of snow for their expensive winter five ring international sales promotion meeting at Whistler.

This is their second disappointment with the Olympics, the first being the rejection of sealskin uniforms by the “unpatriotic” Canadian Olympic team.

That was the brainchild of Gail Shea, the silly little Canadian Fishy Business Minister who was recently struck in the face by a tofu pie in protest of Canada’s rising national sport of seal clubbing. The pie thrower is now on the growing list of “terrorists” who oppose the slaughter of seals.

It’s not unusual for nations to seize events to rally patriotism and nationalistic fervor around. Americans rallied in the wake of the fall of the World Trade Towers. Australians rallied in the wake of the Indonesian nightclub bombing, Germans rallied to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Not wanting to be left in the dust of patriotic lust, Canadian politicians decided to rally to the demise of the seal slaughter boldly stating that it is un-Canadian, in fact treasonous to oppose the killing of baby seals.

You see, Canada’s reaction to dissent by the provinces is to give the whining province everything it wants. Quebec, the whiniest province of the ten, insisted on a language law that would make the province unilingual in a bilingual nation and they got it. The same law makes it a criminal offense to print menus in English only, although French only is okay, and the silly law was even cause to fine a Montreal restaurant for having a parrot in the lobby that spoke English but not a word of French.

The politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa are now doing the same with pathetic little Newfoundland. This easternmost offshore rock in the Atlantic has been Canada’s welfare province ever since it joined the Canadian Confederation in 1949. Canada offered the baby bonus as an enticement and the Newfie’s were onboard immediately for the chance to have kids for cash.

There is not much going on in Newfoundland these days. They used to have a thriving fishing industry until they killed the goose that laid the golden egg by wiping out the cod in an orgy of greed that would have made Wall Street embarrassed.

And now, with a mass exodus of Newfoundlanders seeking jobs in Alberta and Ontario, the government of Canada is trying desperately to make them stay home with enticements like a subsidized seal slaughter that earns enough work points to go on extended unemployment insurance benefits. Kill some seals, make a few bucks at the taxpayer’s expense, and then go on the dole, kick back, and watch American Idol with a six-pack of brewski’s- the primary ambition of the club swingers of the Great White North.

It is understandable of course that these brainless wonders get their kicks from skinning baby seals alive, but what is really strange is the incredible lengths that Canadian politicians are going to defend the baby bashers.

Some of these stunts are ridiculously embarrassing. Like the Governor General biting into a raw seal heart for a photo-op. Yep, there she was, the representative of her Britannic majesty Queen Elizabeth II with seal blood smeared on her lips and chin.

This of course was followed up by the Prime Minister feeling he could not be outdone by a woman, so he had to eat some raw seal meat to show he was just as barbaric as the politically correct Haitian prima donna with the seal blood on her fingers. And to top this off, he ordered the Parliamentary restaurant in Ottawa to put baby seal meat on the menu and patriotic points are scored by those who order it. Only in Canada can a ministerial appointment be denied for refusal to eat a seal burger.

Meanwhile, for us Canadians who have opposed the barbarism of the seal hunt, we are accused of being eco-terrorists and are regularly arrested under an Orwellian law called the Seal Protection Act that actually makes it illegal to witness or document the killing of a seal.

Despite the best efforts of Canadian politicians to coddle their seal clubbing little darlings, the nasty seal loving Europeans went and banned seal pelt imports into Europe. Overnight the market for seal pelts was wiped out.

But Canada is a welfare state and the government believes in supporting archaic industries with handouts, even when the industry no longer produces anything of value.

They tried to blame the seals for wiping out the cod, but only the most ignorant of Canadians believed that myth. Unfortunately for the seals, this low level IQ group is divided into two groups, the fishermen being the dumb ones and the politicians being the dumber.

This week Canada has sunk to an all time low by using the Inuit as pawns in hosting a G7 finance Ministers meeting in the small town of Iqaluit in the far north of Canada way up above the Arctic Circle.

What Canada wants to do is to have Inuit sealers berate and insult European Parliamentarians by accusing them of being insensitive and even racist for opposing the seal hunt. Never mind that the Inuit hunt for seals takes less than 5% of the seals killed in Canada overall. Never mind that Europe actually allowed an exemption for the Inuit.

What the wily Canadian politicians are trying to do is associate Northern poverty and economic hardships to a seal slaughter that does not even take place in Canada’s North but rather on the East Coast

“The Canadians are callously using the plight of traditional and indigenous communities to overturn the ban and in doing so allow Canada to continue to kill 300,000 baby seals a year,“ said Arlene McCarthey, a British member of the European Parliament who played a lead role in negotiating the EU ban.

“Instead of organizing stunts, Canadians should accept the fact that the EU has passed this law,” she told The Toronto Globe and Mail via e-mail.

Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak has publicly stated that that Nunavut officials involved in the Feb. 5-6 summit will wear sealskin, and the ministers will be treated to a country dinner on Saturday that will feature seal meat.

According to the Globe and Mail, the European Union office in Ottawa declined comment, as did several other embassies. Some European diplomats, speaking on condition they not be named, were bemused.

“Once we knew the venue, we kind of knew what would be on the menu,” said one diplomat. “It raises half an eyebrow.”

Diplomats from G7 countries said they were not informed of the provocative menu. Canada never really explained its reasons for holding a meeting of powerful finance ministers in a remote location where cell phone and Internet coverage is spotty and there are not enough hotel rooms for full-sized delegations.

Another European delegate said, “Why put that group up there? It eludes my logic, but we all have the delicacy not to ask that question too loudly.”

Diplomats may not wish to ask that question loudly, but I’m not a European diplomat. I’m a Canadian, originally from the Eastern Maritime province of New Brunswick, and I find it humiliating to see Canadian leaders groveling to appease the perversions of a few hundred baby killers who are just too damn lazy to get re-training for a real job, one that does not embarrass those of us who are Canadians and have no wish to see our great nation smeared with the innocent blood of hundreds of thousands of seal pups.

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

It has been two months since we began operations with Operation Waltzing Matilda. Two months ago, we began with three vessels. We now have two, having lost the Ady Gil when the Japanese whaler Shonan Maru No. 2 cut it in half and sank it on January 6th, 2010.

During the last two months, the Steve Irwin has engaged the Shonan Maru No. 2 in numerous skirmishes and the Sea Shepherd ships Bob Barker and the Ady Gil engaged the main body of the whaling fleet, a day that disrupted the whaling activities and ended with the destruction of our interceptor vessel.

After the sinking of the Ady Gil, the entire Japanese whaling fleet fled West with the Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin on their tail, and for the next 10 days they did not kill whales as they tried to throw us off their tail. They fled 3,000 nautical miles to the extreme Western boundary of the whaling zone they refer to as JARPA II. The Bob Barker continued to be trailed by the Shonan Maru No. 2.

We had to stop the pursuit when the Bob Barker needed our assistance to provide them with lube oil, and the helicopter on the Steve Irwin required an emergency repair as well. To shake off the Japanese security ship tail, we arranged to meet the Bob Barker in a place where we could safely transfer supplies. The Steve Irwin then returned to Fremantle and the Bob Barker returned to hunt the Japanese fleet.

The Bob Barker lost the tail of the Shonan Maru No. 2 when the Japanese had to desist from entering the territorial waters of Australia’s Heard Island.

Now the Steve Irwin, with helicopter repaired, ship refueled, and re-provisioned after a 48 hour turnaround in Fremantle is heading back to rejoin the Bob Barker to search for and pursue the whaling fleet again.

Operation Waltzing Matilda is turning out to be a tough protracted effort but I am confident we will once again impact their kill quotas despite the new obstacles thrown at us this year by the whalers.

The first of these obstacles is the two security ships deployed to defend the fleet and to intercept us in our efforts to close in on the fleet. The Shonan Maru No. 2 and the Yushin Maru have been working as interceptors. This is an incredibly expensive effort by the Japanese government. Crewed by Japanese security forces, these ships are far more aggressive and dangerous than the whalers. The destruction of the Ady Gil was deliberate and bold, far too bold for the whalers to have dared undertake.

The second tactic of the fleet is to flee for great distances in an effort to exhaust the fuel supplies of the Sea Shepherd ships. Fortunately, the Bob Barker has a far greater range than the whaling ships and the Steve Irwin is heading back with a full load of fuel.

What this means is that we still have two ships and with two months left in the whaling season I am confident that we will engage the whalers again and we will interrupt the killing once again. We expect the whalers to be far more aggressive, but we have no intention of retreating.

As Captain John Paul Jones once said, “give me a ship to sail into harm’s way.”

We now have two ships sailing into harm’s way once again and we expect a tough fight but it is not a fight we intend to shy away from. We expect violence. We expect further collisions. We expect damage. We may lose another ship and we face the prospect of injuries to our crew but we will not back down to these killers no matter what they throw at us.

The risks are acceptable. A ship is expendable: the whales are not.

The morale onboard both ships is high and all the crew are eager to once again confront the whalers.

As we move through the ever changing marine weather systems, from the hot and humid coastline of Western Australia, to the heaving, rolling seas and howling offshore winds, and into the meteorological surprises awaiting us in the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties, we feel confident that once again we have whipped up a storm of political controversy further exposing Japan’s outrageously bogus “scientific” research.

Despite the efforts of the Japanese whalers to cast us as anti-Japanese and as outlaws, we are getting our point across that we are down here confronting these whalers not because they are Japanese but because they are poachers. The Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) is nothing more than a front for blatant criminal activity. The Japanese whaling fleet is targeting protected (Minke) and endangered (Humpback and Fin) whales in an established international whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on whaling and in violation of the Antarctic Treaty. They are also killing whales in contempt of an Australian Federal Court ruling that has ordered them out and prohibited their unlawful whaling activities within the territorial waters of the Australian Antarctic Territory.

This is the fifth straight year of confrontations with the Japanese whaling fleet and during these last five years we have accomplished a great deal. Not only have we cut kill quotas and caused the whaling industry to lose tens of millions of dollars we have made this issue into a global campaign.

Will we win this year? Perhaps we won’t but if not we will be back again next year and the year after that if possible. For the Japanese whalers we intend to make this a never-ending trip to the dentist. We don’t intend to see whales die without opposition and without massive economic costs to their killers. And we are costing them dearly. They lose money with every whale they fail to kill because of our interventions. They lose money with every ton of fuel they consume fleeing from us. They lose money by sending down ships and security forces to prevent us from finding their fleet. They lose money in the incredible expenses they undertake to evade Sea Shepherd’s intervention. That figure was eight million US dollars last year and it will be more this year. We are speaking the one language they fully understand and that is economics. It’s all about profit and loss, and we simply need to keep negating their profits. Our objective is to sink the Japanese whaling fleet - economically, to bankrupt them and to humiliate them.

There is nothing noble about killing a whale. It is a cowardly act and the whalers are abject cowards. They flee from us and they make their living by shooting gentle, intelligent, highly social, and sentient beings in the back with organ-shattering explosive tipped harpoons in a manner so despicably cruel that any slaughter house in the world would be closed if animals on land were slaughtered in the same fashion.

The Japanese government likes to compare whales to cows and chickens, constantly demanding to know what the difference is between eating beef and chickens and the eating of whales. They ask this question to cast us as hypocrites. The fact that our ships are vegan vessels they dismiss as evidence of fanaticism, so there is no way to turn - hypocrites if we eat meat and fanatics if we don’t.

But it is not a question of eating meat or not eating meat. It is a question of the need to kill whales. More cows, pigs, and chickens are consumed by the people of Japan than by the people of Australia. In fact, it is safe to say that beef, pork, and chicken are far more representative of the average Japanese diet than whale.

A more accurate comparison would be to the eating of foie gras, something that—due largely to the sheer cruelty of the practice—a small minority of Westerners eat just as a small minority of Japanese people eat whale meat.

No abattoir in the world would allow the killing of a cow by running after it in a field plunging a spear with an explosive tip into it’s back and than slowly electrocuting it or pumping it full of small caliber bullets until it died forty minutes later.

There can be no comparison to the method of killing.

There can also be no comparison between whales and cows as exploitable animals. Cows are domesticated creatures, genetically modified by humans as food animals. There are over three billion cattle in the world. Humans feed them and raise them and the cow is totally dependent upon humanity for survival.

The whale is a wild, non-domestic, sentient being of far fewer numbers than cows. There is not a single whale population on this planet that exceeds a million in number. It makes no sense to compare the whale to one of the most populous animals on the planet - the cow.  Nor does it make sense to compare the slaughter of cows—which is legal—to the illegal slaughter of whales.

The Japanese argue that whales consume large amounts of fish and thus are a threat to the survival of many fish species. This is an ecologically ridiculous argument, but put into proper perspective is the fact that chickens, pigs, and domestic salmon consume some 35% of the fish taken from the sea in the form of fishmeal. The pigs of the world eat more fish than all the world’s sharks. It is human greed that is destroying the fish in the sea - not the whales, the seals, the sharks, or the sea-birds.

Sea Shepherd dramatizes the issues through confrontations and these dramatics get our foot into the media door to address the facts and to explain the ecological realities of the slaughter of whales.

It’s all politics and economics mixed in with sociological and ecological realities, and thus the arguments are complex and divisive.

What is not complex is why Sea Shepherd confronts and opposes the Japanese whaling fleet. We do so simply because what the Japanese whalers are doing is illegal as defined by international conservation law and we as an organization are empowered to intervene in accordance with the principles established by the United Nations World Charter for Nature.

The proof of this is quite simple. Not once in six years of Antarctic whale defense campaigns have Sea Shepherd or any of the officers of the ships or organization been charged with a criminal offense. Not once have we been sued. Not even Japan has laid charges or initiated a lawsuit against us. Why? The last place a criminal operation wishes to go is to court.

The Sea Shepherd ships operate out of Australian ports with the full support of the Australian people. The Japanese whaling ships are prohibited by law from entering Australian territorial waters. Sea Shepherd ships refuel in Australian ports. Japanese ships are not allowed to use Australian ports for refueling, provisions, or repairs. Last year, Indonesia ordered the Japanese whaler Yushin Maru No. 2 to leave Indonesia when it sought repairs from ice damage caused during a confrontation with the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin.

Despite public relations propaganda from the Japanese whaling industry, and political pressure from the Japanese government, their accusations of “eco-terrorism” against Sea Shepherd are falling on deaf ears especially from nations having to deal with real terrorist issues.

The world is waking up to and becoming increasingly more disgusted with the ICR’s claims that its cruel and illegal whaling activities are “scientific.” No one is buying that story any longer, and fewer and fewer people are buying into Japan’s so-called cultural justification for whaling.

Japanese whaling is not justified on cultural grounds. Modern pelagic whaling was established in Japan in 1912 by the Norwegians and sent to Antarctica in 1946 under orders from the American General Douglas MacArthur to provide cheap meat for post-war Japanese citizens. Young people in Japan do not eat whale meat anymore. The market for whale meat is ridiculously small and Japanese warehouses continue to store a surplus of whale meat, while much of it is made into pet food.

If not for Japanese government subsidies, whaling would not survive. But many Japanese government officials who are still very well connected and thus influential were given cushy jobs with the ICR, and the union that supplies the crew to the ships is a Yakuza controlled union. The Yakuza (Japanese mafia) have a way of getting what they want in Japan.

And thus we have a criminal activity supported by corruption in the form of influence peddling and bribery in the government, and backed by the most powerful criminal organization in Japan.

What I have found especially interesting is that not once in the years that I have accused the whaling industry of being influenced by the Yakuza has any public relations representative of the whaling industry ever denied it.

When you think about it, the opposition against Sea Shepherd is awesome. On one side we have the ICR supported by the Japanese government and the Yakuza, and on the other we have a small volunteer driven conservation organization that does not enjoy any financial support or protection from any government.

And, we operate at a distinct disadvantage. If one of use were to be killed by the whalers, the Japanese government would justify and defend the crime and we would hear very little from our own governments, all of whom seem terrified to be critical of Japan over anything. Consider the Ady Gil. It was deliberately sunk by a Japanese whaling vessel without a single critical condemnation from any nation and we do not expect any charges to be laid against the Captain of the Shonan Maru No. 2 for the simple reason that it would be harmful to trade relations. On the other hand if I were to have rammed and sunk a Japanese whaler, I would most likely now be under arrest and my actions universally condemned.

I do not know what the future holds for our next engagement. Maybe we should ram and destroy a Japanese whaler just to illustrate the blatant hypocrisy that holds the whale killers to one standard and those of us who oppose the killing of whales to another?

But of course we cannot do such a thing because Sea Shepherd has a responsibility to stay within the boundaries of the law and, in keeping with our strict policy of nonviolence, to not cause injury to those we oppose. We have an unblemished record in this regard and it is a record we intend to keep.

What is the Conservation Status of the Whales in the Southern Ocean?

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

The Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) is a front for commercial whaling. It has been a front for commercial whaling since 1987 and was established in response to the implementation of an international ban on commercial whaling by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986.

The international scientific community does not regard research conducted by Japanese whalers as legitimate. There is no science involved; it’s all a con and a masquerade and that is what it has been since 1987.

The ICR is little more than a bogus front for an illegal enterprise heavily subsidized by the Japanese government and influenced greatly by the nefarious manipulations of the Japanese Yakuza.

It is interesting that for years ever since I was tipped off about Yakuza involvement I have never had a single spokesperson for the ICR or the Japanese government deny my publicized accusations about Yakuza involvement. The fact is that the Japanese Union that provides crew to the Japanese whaling fleet is a Yakuza controlled union.

Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels once remarked that if a lie is told often enough people will begin to see the lie as truth.

The lie the ICR has been telling for twenty-three years is emblazoned on the side of the floating abattoir named the Nisshin Maru. In big bold white lettering conveniently written in English is the word “RESEARCH.”

There are no sophisticated laboratories on this sea-going slaughterhouse, but there is machinery for cutting-up, flash-freezing, and efficient packaging of frozen whale meat.

The slaughter of the Antarctic Minke whale has been justified by the Japanese insistence that Minke whale populations are growing rapidly. However a recent and much more credible study by Stanford University based on real research on Minke whale DNA has found that the populations are in fact not increasing.

The study states, “An analysis of Minke whale DNA, by a Stanford research team has revealed that the current population of Antarctic Minke whales is well within the historical norm of the species over the last 100,000 years. There is no absolutely evidence of a significant increase in the population of Antarctic Minke whales.”

The ICR has been claiming that the population of Antarctic Minke whales has risen significantly since World War II and that Japan's so called scientific whaling program has been "sampling" increasing numbers of them each year on the grounds that reducing the number of Minkes is actually a benefit to the whales.

In other words, they have to kill them to save them. Conveniently the “samples” end up on the plates of diners in Japanese restaurants and in the freezer section of Japanese supermarkets.

The ICR continues to insist that Minke populations are increasing. However, this new scientific analysis of the whales' DNA by the Stanford research team has demonstrated the opposite conclusion. There is no evidence of a significant increase in the population of Minke whales and the research demonstrates that the current population of Antarctic Minke whales has not risen above what it has been since World War II:

According to the study:

"Based on our genetic analysis, average Antarctic Minke whale populations over the past 100,000 years have been around 670,000," said Stephen Palumbi, professor of biology, director of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station and senior fellow at the university's Woods Institute for the Environment. "That number easily falls within the range of current population estimates for the whales, as determined in studies by the International Whaling Commission," he said. Palumbi is the senior author of a paper describing the work, published in the journal Molecular Ecology.

The controversy over the numbers of Antarctic Minke whales is rooted in the early 20th century, when commercial whalers killed an estimated 2 million large baleen whales in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Blue, Humpback, Fin and Sei whale populations all plummeted.

According to some estimates, those whales, if they were still around, would annually eat as much as 150 million pounds of krill, a tiny, shrimp-like crustacean that is a dietary staple of all baleen whales. Some researchers have suggested that with so many large whales gone, the reduced competition for krill has created an opportunity for the Minke to flourish.”

According to the report, “If the Antarctic Minke whale population has boomed, then their large numbers might be inhibiting the recovery of other whale species that had been overexploited. This idea has been heavily promoted by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of the main justifications for Japan's annual slaughter of Minke whales. But until now, no one had any scientific data to either support or refute the theory of a minke population boom.”

"You can look at a claim of Minke whales being super abundant as being a testable scientific hypothesis that has been sitting there for a very long time, without being tested or refuted," Palumbi said. "So we decided to work out the ways of testing that hypothesis."

To determine whether the current population of Minke whales represents a boom, Palumbi's team, including postdoctoral researcher Kristen Ruegg, had to compare it to population numbers over tens of thousands of years. Trying to estimate the population of any animal species that far back in time is obviously a challenge, but by looking at the variability in modern DNA, researchers can do just that.

A type of genetic mutation called a "silent mutation" is a minor change to an individual's DNA that has no effect on its ability to survive. These silent mutations are passed on to subsequent generations and add to a population's genetic diversity over time. Because the mutations occur at a predictable rate, the accumulation of mutations– and the variability – in modern individuals can be used to work backward and estimate what the population size had to have been at a given point in the past for the number of mutations in the modern whale's DNA to accumulate.

"We have done a lot of work over the last couple of years on pinning that mutation rate down, estimating the variability in rate across many genes and applying it to a well-accepted model of how DNA evolves," Palumbi said. "Those advances have come out in a series of papers over the last couple of years, and so we were ready to use this to test the Minke boom hypothesis."

But the first challenge in doing the analysis was simply obtaining some DNA. Mounting an expedition to the frigid waters of the Antarctic is neither easy nor inexpensive, but there is one place where Minke whale DNA can be obtained with relative ease – the seafood markets of Japan. Whale meat is sold in these markets to help defray the cost of the Japanese scientific whaling voyages.

Palumbi's team has been going to Japan to obtain Minke meat for the last 15 years, collaborating with Oregon State University scientist Scott Baker, and has developed a network of buyers who visit fish markets throughout central Japan for them.

Ironically, the only scientific research being done was by American researchers using whale meat taken by the Japanese whalers. This research has proven the Japanese theories wrong. Perhaps the Japanese came to the same conclusion with their own research, but we don’t know about it because their research remains unpublished.

The Stanford team set up their own mobile molecular lab in Japan.

"They bring the meat to us and we set up a little molecular lab in our hotel room in Tokyo and extract and copy the DNA there in the hotel," he said. The team then brings back a "gazillion" copies for analysis.

The report continues:

The average population of 670,000 Minkes that Palumbi's team estimated with their DNA analysis falls well within the population estimates by the International Whaling Commission for the late 20th century. The commission supervised several field surveys that estimated the Antarctic Minke whale population was about 608,000 between 1978 and 1984, and roughly 766,000 from 1985 to 1991.

Palumbi said the Japanese estimate the current Minke population at 760,000. "They put that number on every package of Minke whale meat that they sell,"he said.

An unpublished 2006 report of another population survey supervised by the commission suggests that the Minke population may actually be declining, rather than booming or remaining steady.

None of the estimates support the notion of a late 20th-century population explosion of Antarctic Minke whales when compared with Palumbi's historical estimate.

"The hypothesis of a population explosion resulting from krill abundance has no validity," Palumbi said. "We can refute it, and that failed idea is no reason whatsoever to be hunting Minke whales."

Palumbi said the larger goal of the study was to provide accurate information to use in managing the Antarctic minke whale population. "What any kind of management needs is scientific data," he said.

"If you don't test a hypothesis, if you just assert that something is really important and then move on to your management plan from that standpoint, then not only is that management plan likely to be wrong, but you have no way of improving it over time," he said.

The Japanese have not explained the reasons they have added endangered Fin and Humpback whales to their kill quota. Fortunately, Sea Shepherd has prevented the killing of these whales by slowing the fleet down. Normally the Fins are killed after the Minke whales, and when Sea Shepherd slows down the Minke whale quota it affects the Japanese whaling fleet’s ability to pursue Fin whales. Only one Fin whale has been slain in the last two years due to Sea Shepherd’s efforts. The Japanese have not attempted to kill a Humpback whale because of political pressure resulting from the negative publicity about their illegal whaling activities.

In July 2009, New Scientist magazine stated that there was no scientific validity to Japan’s so- called research whaling. The scientific committee of the IWC rejects the validity of the ICR research. Outside of Japan there is very little support from the scientific community.

This is simply an attempt to use science as an excuse to profit from the slaughter of whales - just commercial whaling in a poor disguise.

Related Information:

* DNA study: Hunting whales on grounds of overabundance not justified

* Palumbi Lab

* 'Are Antarctic minke whales unusually abundant because of 20th century whaling?' Molecular Ecology, Vol. 19, Issue 2

The Australian

Junichi Sato’s opinion piece (January 18th, 2010) called for Anti-whalers to win over Japanese public opinion and criticized the tactics of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as alienating to the Japanese public.

He said “many would be surprised that Greenpeace has not sent a ship down to target the whaling fleet for the past two years.”

I am sure some people would indeed be surprised especially the ones accosted on the streets by Greenpeace fund-raisers who actually have claimed credit for Sea Shepherd campaigns. I know, for one such street huckster said so to myself, not knowing who I was.

Sato says that we must win the hearts and minds of the Japanese public and says that the Greenpeace approach is more constructive.

However the Greenpeace approach was to allegedly commit a felony by breaking and entering a mail facility and stealing a package of whale meat addressed to a private citizen. The Greenpeace justification being that the whale meat had been stolen from the Nisshin Maru and was being sold privately.

Therefore Greenpeacers Toru Suzuki and Junichi Sato decided that exposing this crime was worth committing a crime of their own. They were caught and charged with breaking and entering and theft.

And the crime they were exposing was an internal embezzlement within the whaling industry when the real crime is the whaling industry itself.

It was like having the Australian Federal Police exposing crimes by criminals against a gang leader for the benefit of the gang leader. The whaling industry said no crime had been committed and said that crewmembers taking cuts of whale meat for personal use was just a bonus. The only arrests and charges were against Sato and Suzuki.

Greenpeace then turned two alleged thieves into international whale saving heroes with multi-million dollar direct mail solicitations for their defense and it gave them an excuse to no longer send one of their expensive ships into the Southern Ocean to hang banners and take pictures of dying whales.

Greenpeace condemns Sea Shepherd tactics although not a single Sea Shepherd action in three decades from the day Sea Shepherd was founded has resulted in a single felony conviction, a single lawsuit and most importantly we have not caused a single injury nor suffered any fatalities or serious injuries ourselves.

The Greenpeace record includes hundreds of arrests and convictions including felonies and numerous successful lawsuits against Greenpeace. Greenpeace also has had numerous activists injured and they even have had fatalities on their ships.

Greenpeace states that their purpose is to bear witness; a Quaker tradition stemming from the founding of Greenpeace that states that evil can be overcome by bearing witness.

As a co-founder of Greenpeace I never knew this. This revisionist philosophy was not a part of the Greenpeace actions for the first decade of operations in the Seventies. It was adopted later and to me it is merely a theological justification for cowardice.

You don’t walk down the street and see a woman being assaulted and do nothing. You don’t walk down the street and see a child being molested and do nothing and you don’t walk down the street and see a puppy or kitten being kicked to death on the sidewalk and doing nothing but hang a banner and take a picture of the crime. And therefore you don’t watch a whale die an agonizing death while you hang banners and take pictures.

I find Junichi Sato to be less interested in saving whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary than he is about using Greenpeace funds to defend himself from the charges of being a petty thief.

Greenpeace abandoned the whales in the ocean to campaign in Japan to change the minds of the Japanese public. It’s a failure. Japanese support for whaling is entrenched. They have made zero progress in this educational approach.

Sea Shepherd however takes a more realistic approach - economics! We need to cut kill quotas every year through intervention and harassment of the fleet.

We have done so for four years. And for four years, the Japanese whaling fleet has not made a profit.

This is the language they understand - profit and loss and if we continue to impact their profits we will achieve our more realistic objective of sinking the Japanese whaling fleet economically. We intend to bankrupt them.

I would welcome Greenpeace’s help in directly intervening in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, after all they are presently building a $40 million dollar ship to add to their fleet and that would be useful; but for this great organization that I co-founded in 1972 to be directing it’s resources to the defense of two common burglars is simply pathetic and a betrayal of the whales.

Captain Paul Watson

Captain Paul Watson is a co-founder of Greenpeace (1972) and Greenpeace International (1979), the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and is currently the Master of the Steve Irwin presently in the Southern Ocean opposing the Japanese whaling fleet.

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

A controversy this week in Australia has demonstrated that the Japanese government can be relied upon to consistently deny responsibility for its actions.

What does the deliberate sinking of the Sea Shepherd ship Ady Gil have in common with the deliberate sinking of the Australian hospital ship Centaur in 1943?

The answer is Japan’s refusal to take responsibility for its crimes.

Last month the wreck of the hospital ship Centaur was found off Moreton Island in South-East Queensland.

As soon as the wreck was discovered a report was sent from the Australian Military to the government advising the politicians to be silent about the circumstance of the sinking of the Centaur to avoid any comments that would upset Japan and damage relations between the two nations.

The Australian military wants to sign a Defense Pact with Japan despite the fact that Japan does not recognize the Australian claim to the Australian Antarctic Territory and despite the fact the Japanese whalers are operating in contempt of an Australian Federal Court order prohibiting whaling in Australian waters.

Japan has threatened to not sign the Pact unless Australia backs off of its opposition to whaling. To his credit, Prime Minster Kevin Rudd ignored this request and declared that the sinking of the Centaur was a “violation of the most basic international and humanitarian conventions.”

"The action to sink the Centaur by the Japanese navy at the time was, in our view, a complete breach of international law," Mr. Rudd said.

The Prime Minister denied that the Federal Government was cautioned about commenting on the incident in a secret Defense Department document.

However Defense Minister, John Faulkner, said a briefing did in fact exist but was not aimed at silencing the Government.

"That brief wasn't, of course, about silencing the Prime Minister," Mr. Faulkner said. "That is not the case at all. Defense didn't do that and didn't want to do that. "What the brief was about was the importance of making contact with the Japanese government about plans that were developing in relation to finding Centaur.

Although Prime Minister Rudd stressed that Japan was today an ally, he added, “"But let's be clear cut about it: the decision to sink an unarmed hospital ship clearly marked with Red Cross symbols, as it was, was a violation of international law and was a complete violation of the most humanitarian principals."

The Centaur, an Australian Hospital Ship, was a motor passenger ship converted in early 1943 for use as a hospital ship.

On 12 May 1943 the Centaur sailed unescorted from Sydney at 0945 hours carrying her crew and normal staff, as well as stores and equipment of the 2/12th Field Ambulance but no patients. It was sunk without warning by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine on 14 May 1943 at approximately 0400 hours, its position being approximately 27°17’ S, 153°58' E about 50 miles east north-east of Brisbane.

Of the 332 persons on board, only 64 survived. These survivors spent 35 hours on rafts before being rescued.

The ship had been appropriately lit and marked to indicate that it was a hospital ship and its sinking was regarded as an atrocity. The Australian Government delivered an official protest to Japan over the incident. The Japanese did not acknowledge responsibility for the incident and the War Crimes Tribunal could not identify the responsible submarine. However, the Japanese official war history made clear that it was submarine 1-177, under the command of Lt. Commander Hajime Nakagawa who had sunk the Centaur. Lt. Commander Nakagawa was convicted as a war criminal for firing on survivors of the British Chivalry, which his ship had sunk in the Indian Ocean. He was imprisoned after the war for six years for machine-gunning helpless British sailors as they swam away from the sinking Chivalry. Hajime Nakagawa, died in 1986 at age 84, silent about the Centaur.

The Japanese position today is that the circumstances remain "murky" as to who was responsible for the sinking of the Centaur. Historians and relatives of those who were aboard the hospital ship have rejected this response.

Tokyo so far has not answered calls by Queensland's Acting Premier Paul Lucas and others for a specific apology for the sinking and also for a possible contribution to the $4 million search effort.

Brisbane pilot John Foley, who co-authored a book about the Centaur with Canadian academic Chris Milligan, said Japan admitted its role in 1979 in a military history by former Rear Admiral Kaneyoshi Sakamoto of the Japanese National Defense College.

Considered Japan's leading expert in submarine warfare, Sakamoto and his book, The History of Submarine Warfare, said Japanese submarine 1-177 sank the Centaur on May 14, 1943 at coordinates near where it was located.

But a spokesman for the Japanese embassy in Canberra said there was no “conclusive proof” Japan did it. "The Japanese perspective is it is up in the air," he said.

Brisbane resident Barry McCosker, whose father and uncle were Centaur survivors, said he was "flabbergasted" that the Japanese still weren't taking responsibility in 2010. "They can't deny it was them," but he said. "I know we won't get any apology”

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Ady Gil Captain Pete Bethune will most likely not receive an apology either for the destruction of his vessel. Japan refuses to cooperate with investigations by Australian and New Zealand maritime authorities.

Japan’s method of operations has not changed since 1943. They deliberately destroyed the Sea Shepherd ship Ady Gil and then immediately claimed that the fault was not theirs. So absurd was the Japanese claim that they even accused Sea Shepherd of deliberately causing an oil spill after the Shonan Maru #2 cut the Ady Gil into two pieces. The first piece sank quickly, the large aft section sank slowly afterwards after all efforts to salvage it were unsuccessful. Fortunately the crew of the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker was able to remove the diesel fuel and oil from the Ady Gil before it sank.

Nothing has changed much. The sinking of the Centaur, a hospital ship in 1943 was deliberate and it was a war crime that killed 278 Australians, yet Japan still to this day refuses to acknowledge responsibility in the face of overwhelming evidence. The same holds true for the sinking of the Ady Gil, no matter what evidence or the results of Australian and New Zealand investigations, Japan will refuse to acknowledge responsibility.

The Japanese government operates on the assumption that international law is something to be utilized for Japan’s advantage but will not acknowledge international laws being used against their national interests.

Of course the crimes that the Japanese whalers are committing in the Southern Oceans are hardly comparable to the horrific atrocities of the Second World War, the spirit of contempt for other nations and international law is the same.

Japanese whalers have arrogantly invaded the sovereignty of the Australian Antarctic Territorial waters for the purpose of killing endangered and protected whales in an established whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on whaling, in violation of the Antarctic Treaty and numerous international conservation regulations.

Denying their criminal activities in violation of international conservation and maritime law, does not absolve them of their guilt, just as denying war crimes does not absolve them of having committed war crimes.

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

A few years ago I made an observation that in the modern media, politicians and corporations demonstrated that if you don’t know a fact, a statistic, then make it up on the spot. I was actually citing former President Ronald Reagan as an example of this approach. Now my observation has been twisted and spun to suggest that it was myself who invented this approach to media.

Ironically I was accused of this, this very week by the biggest right wing bullethead presently polluting the airwaves - Glenn Beck. Ironic because to underscore his condemnation of me he made up a couple of fabricated facts.

“And remember those whale protestors who actually attacked and rammed into a Japanese whaling ship? (ADD moment, your honor) Whales? I mean, they're great and everything, but when you are risking life and limb to stop someone from catching a whale, wow. Who's daddy didn't love them? Anyway, the boat that sunk the Japanese ship is from Paul Watson's organization.” - Glenn Beck

Amazing! The man spun the actual incident around completely. Although the Sea Shepherd ship Ady Gil was deliberately rammed by the Japanese whaling vessel Shonan Maru #2 and later sank, Beck managed to accuse Sea Shepherd of ramming and sinking the Japanese whaling ship.

Beck went on to say;

“Watson's a great guy, a progressive. He's the guy who was featured in that "Whale Wars" reality show, where he routinely resorts to physical violence against humans to save an animal. He has reportedly said that if you don't know an answer, a fact, a statistic, then... make it up on the spot. And "there's nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write the history." - Glenn Beck

The fact is that neither Sea Shepherd or I have ever injured a single human being, we have never been convicted of a felony nor we have never even been sued. Yet he makes an accusation that I routinely resort to “physical violence” against humans to save an animal. As it happens our campaigns are not designed to “save an animal.” The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is an anti-poaching organization and our objective is to uphold international conservation law against illegal activities. We don’t protest, we intervene.

Beck then adds that I made the statement that “there’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write the history.” I did say this but in quite a different context than Beck would have Americans believe. I said in a lecture that history is not to be trusted because the winners write the history and their version does not favor the losers. Thus Sir Winston Churchill would have been condemned as a terrorist if Hitler had won the war and “terrorists” are not “terrorists” is we agree with them. "One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” It’s a valid observation and does not mean that I have ever advocated terrorism.

“Attacking a civilian boat, ramming a bill through, voting 10 times in Massachusetts they can spin it in the history books. They saved the whales. They achieved health care for all. They fundamentally transformed America.” - Glenn Beck

Beck goes on to make the accusation again that we attacked a civilian boat when the evidence demonstrates just the opposite, the most damning piece of evidence being that it is a Sea Shepherd ship on the bottom of the ocean and not a Japanese vessel.  The bizarre thing is that he mixes our campaign to defend whales from poachers in Antarctica with the Massachusetts Gubernatorial elections and health care in America as a spin for the history books suggesting there is some sort of weird left wing conspiracy to protect whales and to provide health care for Americans. Beck, a reformed alcoholic, is probably having psychotic flashbacks to the good old days when he saw pink elephants tap dancing on the rim of his whiskey glass.

Beck, the self appointed super American patriot, goes on to say;

“Americans are starting to wake up to it, even Democrats, even Democrats in Kennedyville. They know something isn't right. And that something is the uber-left. The Van Jones, communist-loving radicals. The Chairman Mao admirers in the White House, like the Ron Blooms of the world, who says he agrees with Mao about power coming from the barrel of a gun.”

“I don't believe the majority of Americans think like these people do. But they don't care. If you don't believe these radicals think they are superior to you, that they will run you over if you get in the way of their do-gooding for greater good, then you don't understand history.” - Glenn Beck

I’m actually not a left-winger. I’m a conservationist and that automatically makes me a conservative. Sea Shepherd’s objectives are simply to uphold existing international conservation laws.  Suddenly according to Glenn Beck, defending whales against Japanese poachers is now part of the “communist conspiracy”.  I’ve always held the view that Chairman Mao was a mass-murdering tyrant. History has proven however that power comes from the barrel of a gun. Ask the original Native Americans. The one fact that has never changed throughout history is that “might makes right.”

The problem with people like Glenn Beck is that he does not like people who make observations about psychology, history, science or anything else. To Beck, making an observation means that the observer is now advocating that which was observed. He would have us choose to simply not observe or think at all.

And many of his mindless minions will now believe a Japanese whaling ship lies on the bottom of the Southern Ocean because a Sea Shepherd ship rammed and sank them. There is no reason for them to look up the facts. Glenn Beck made up some facts for them. No need to You Tube the video of the ramming and sinking because Glenn Beck has made it clear that the “violent commie whale huggers are not to be trusted.”

Maybe a little enticement may be in order to motivate a few couch potato Beck bums to look up the “facts” for themselves. Towards this end I will personally award one million U.S. dollars to any person who can back up Glenn Beck’s absurd claim that Sea Shepherd rammed and sank a Japanese whaling vessel in the Southern Ocean during this campaign.

If their boy Beck is right as many believe him to be, then a million big ones can be theirs for the asking.

Glenn Beck may not be the dumbest hysterical drama queen on right wing television, after all there is a great deal of competition, but he certainly does come close.

 Click Here to view the original transcript from the Glenn Beck Show on January 19, 2010

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

It is difficult to express just how difficult Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s task is in organizing our annual campaigns against the illegal whaling activities of the Japanese whaling fleet.

It takes tens of thousands of manpower hours to secure the ships, to prepare the ships, to maintain the ships, to provision and fuel the ships, to prepare the helicopter, to raise the funding to finance the campaigns, to deal with the media, governments, bureaucracies, and every little detail that must be attended to in order to enable us to mount and sustain a campaign.

It is also difficult to express just how potentially dangerous these campaigns are, and it is a testament to our abilities that after six Antarctic campaigns involving a total of twenty-four months at sea with four different ships, we have not suffered a single serious injury, nor have we caused a single injury to those we oppose.

This is remarkable, because we are operating these voyages in the most remote and meteorologically hostile seas in the world. We thread our way through icebergs and ice floes over thousands of miles of barren coastline. There are no hospitals down here, no police. There are no rescue facilities should things go wrong. We are literally two thousand miles from anything that could assist us if disaster should visit us.

And disaster could visit us at any hour of any day. There is the ice that could gouge a hole through our steel plates and sink us. There are horrendous unpredictable weather conditions where we could lose our small boats or our helicopter. And there are the frigid waters where if one of my crew were to fall overboard they would have only minutes to live. And finally there is the violent hostility of the Japanese whalers and the security force sent to defend them. This violence has already this season sunk and destroyed one of our three ships, the Ady Gil. 

I have seventy-six other people in these waters with me, seventy-six people from sixteen different nations, on two ships, volunteers whose lives are in my hands. My decisions affect each and every one of them. If I make a mistake, anyone of them—or more than one—could be seriously injured or killed.

This is an awesome responsibility, and I am well aware of the potential risks.  And each and every one of my crew are aware of the risks they have chosen to take when they agreed with me to come down here to place ourselves in harm's way to protect endangered whales from being cruelly killed by the Japanese poaching operations assaulting the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

The reality is that what we are doing is a Mission Impossible, and the strangest thing about these campaigns is that we are actually winning. We are achieving our objectives through sheer audacity, strength of will, and our love for the oceans and the incredibly beautiful beings we are championing—the whales.

We have cut the Japanese whaling fleet’s self-determined kill quotas every year for four years and cost the whalers their profits for the last three years. And we have made the entire world aware of the crimes the Japanese whaling fleet is committing in these lonely remote waters. We have saved over 1400 whales and cost the whalers tens of millions of dollars, and we have forced the issue into political debate involving dozens of nations. The campaigns have been more effective than we ever thought they could be.

We did know that these campaigns would be protracted, tough, and challenging. After all, we are a small non-governmental organization taking on one of the most powerful economic super powers on the planet—Japan.

We are opposing a fleet of over half a dozen ships, all faster and more powerful than we are and manned by hundreds of professional crew by a Maritime Union controlled by the Japanese Yakusa.

We are opposing an enemy that has received over US $120 million of government subsidies. It is an enemy with highly paid public relation firms to spin its message, and it has the money and the manpower to strike at us from every level.

This enemy can hire naval "experts" like old admirals and captains to swear that the destruction of the Ady Gil was not the fault of the Japanese. It can churn out ridiculous media releases accusing Sea Shepherd of having lethal weapons, knowing that some outlets will pick up and publish the nonsense.

One of the most insidious and underhanded attacks has been the ability of the Japanese whaling industry to use cyber warfare. We have reason to believe that they have interfered (albeit temporarily) with our website with malicious assaults and infiltrated internet social forums and websites with a well funded campaign of disinformation and strategies designed to undermine our morale and erode our support with a barrage of lies, ad hominem attacks, character assassination, and cyber bullying.

Some of these infiltrators are simply hired or volunteer cyber guns from Japan. Others are unsuspecting but easily manipulated and opinionated trolls who have been converted through psychological manipulation into attacking myself, my crew, and even more despicably, they have cowardly targeted our families and loved ones.

Like an army of mindless zombies, these infiltrators can be unleashed by simply dropping bait into various social network sites like MySpace, Facebook, or internet forums or by motivating these trolls to set up websites and social networking pages dedicated to attacking us personally.

This bait ranges from fabricated accusations of racism and corruption to extremely personal attacks on the appearance, motivation, tactics, and personalities of myself, my crew, and our friends and families.

Regrettably, in additional to well-meaning individuals, the internet social networks are also full of frustrated, self loathing, jealous, and hate spewing people who have come to be called trolls. This originates from the folk story of the troll that lives under the bridge waiting to prey without discrimination on anyone passing by overhead.

The only way to deal with these trolls is to ignore them and to deny their parasitical urge to feed on their victims by inflicting hurt and scandal.

We suspect that Japanese cyber gangs have discovered that they can attack Sea Shepherd using the drifting army of trolls who have nothing better to do than to sit behind their keyboards looking for victims to appease their sense of low self esteem.

When you think about it, the only people who have the time and energy to waste attacking people they don't know on internet forums are people without jobs, a healthy social life, or stability—in other words, people who need to get a life.

What has been really enlightening with the personal attacks on us is that the type of zombies who have been directed towards us actually believe they are defending whales and animals by trying to rip the jugular vein out of our campaigns in an effort to sabotage everything we are trying to do to actually protect the whales.  

And they are deceptive. A few months ago, a woman describing herself as a moderator for an online forum invited me to answer some questions from "fans" on the page. She said that there was a need to defend the whales from advocates of whaling. I made the mistake of accepting her invitation only to find that whatever questions I answered were ignored, and I found myself being personally attacked. I learned very quickly that reasonable debate was not possible, and I had just set myself as a target for hateful and spiteful attacks. I also found that this woman was actually a pro-whaler herself and was a self-appointed moderator.

I also made the mistake of having a personal MySpace page, and over a period of a year I had accumulated some 10,000 "friends" who I foolishly just accepted, not realizing at the time that a great many of them were not friends at all. Once the personal attacks began, I had no choice but to remove everyone to address and stop the dissemination of my personal information to every vile forum in cyberspace.

Most of the 10,000 names on MySpace never sent me a message at all, and I had no idea who they were, but amongst them were a number of trolls posing as supporters who began to maliciously spread gossip and disinformation and quotes from me taken out of context. I decided that there was not a positive reason to have these 10,000 names. After all, there is an official Sea Shepherd MySpace page and a Sea Shepherd website that provide all the information anyone needs to know about Sea Shepherd and Sea Shepherd campaigns.

I then found that my innocent girlfriend and I were being targeted by so called "Sea Shepherd supporters" who were angry at being deleted from my MySpace page and who seemed to have the idea that I was their property and had no choice but to keep them as so called "friends."

I began receiving the most bizarre messages from people who threatened to "expose" me for what I truly was, which in their twisted minds included everything from being a KGB-trained assassin to being a covert merchant of whale meat trying to destroy my competition to keep whale prices high. In truth, it never occurred to me just how truly warped and bent people can actually be. It was not a pleasant revelation, and it made me realize that MySpace and Facebook are both simply modern day Pandora’s boxes—once the lid is lifted and one peers in, torrents of vile hate and spite stream out, and your personal information becomes a commodity to be clutched and manipulated by the most foul and perverse minds on the planet, dirty minds given a key to our hearts, minds, and souls by modern technology.

Since I have left on this campaign, people I have never met have unleashed a vicious wave of cyber bullying—vile, obscene, personal character assassinations. The intensity and the viciousness of the attacks are disturbing and unfathomable, because they come from complete strangers who do not know me, my crew, or our loved ones.

But as cowards are want to do, they went for our throats, and they began this pogrom of hate after I had left for sea to defend the whales—and what is so warped about their attacks is that they profess to be "supporters" of Sea Shepherd and/or saving the whales.

So while they lurk like stalkers from behind the mask of their keyboards sending their hate out in waves of self righteous indignation, my crew and I are risking our lives actually defending the whales knowing that these "supporters" are trying to demoralize and sabotage our efforts by launching personal cyber attacks.

The Japanese cyber guns knew exactly what they were doing when they manipulated this program to direct the zombie-like energies of the cyber army of the lost, frustrated, scattered, and just plain weird, towards focusing in on sabotaging our efforts through psychological warfare.

It's easy to hate. It's easy to be critical. It's easy to fabricate lies and it's easy to be a cyber bully. All you need is a computer to provide the door of empowerment.

But let's put this into perspective. There are seven billion people on the planet, and only seventy-seven of us down here in these distant waters actually saving the lives of whales, actually damaging illegal Japanese whaling activities and thus actually making a difference.

There are tens of thousands of people who support the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society financially.

And there are a small handful of cyber trolls trying to demoralize us through lies and hate.

All I can say is that I am glad I'm down here blocking the exploding harpoons of Japanese whalers and that I am not one of those pathetic and deceitful losers.

Thank-you to all of our supporters and loved ones who stand tall and proud in the face of such hatred. Your courage inspires us, and because of you we will save hundreds of whales this season and Operation Waltzing Matilda will be a success.

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

This is 42nd Day since Operation Waltzing Matilda was launched on December 7th, 2009. That was the day the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin departed from Fremantle in Western Australia.

Since that day the Steve Irwin has logged over 10,000 miles, 4,500 of those miles since last refueling in Hobart, Tasmania on December 31st.

The Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker departed from Mauritius off the coast of Africa on December 18th and has been at sea for 32 days.

The Sea Shepherd vessel Ady Gil’s short lived voyage began on December 19 out of Hobart. Seventeen days later, the Ady Gil was on the bottom under 3,000 meters of water after the Japanese security ship guarding the Japanese whaling fleet deliberately rammed and destroyed the Ady Gil, cutting our interceptor vessel clean in half on January 6.

It has been a tense and dramatic campaign with numerous clashes between the Sea Shepherd crew and the crews on the whaling ships.

But strangely, the most effective days for the Sea Shepherd crew are not the days of direct engagement with the vessels of the whaling fleet.

The most successful days are the days we do nothing at all. The days we run full out, covering miles and miles of ocean in pursuit of the whaling fleet.

Sea Shepherd’s objective is to impact the kill quotas of the Japanese fleet, to make sure they do not slaughter the numbers they intend to kill.

For four years we have directly cut their quotas. 83 whales shut down the first year, 500 saved during Operation Leviathan, close to another 500 during operation Migaloo, and some 305 for Operation Musashi.

The Japanese whalers response to the arrival of a Sea Shepherd ship is to run full out for thousands of miles if need be to force Sea Shepherd to burn fuel. And while they are running, they can’t kill whales and that’s fine with us.

It is during these days of pursuit that we save whales and every day that the fleet can be kept running, the lives of a dozen whales are spared.

Since the day the Ady Gil sank south of Hobart, the Japanese whaling fleet has been running full out to the West. We have already chased them over 3,000 miles along the Coast of Antarctica to the area South of Africa.

The pursuit started off George V Land west pass Terre Adelie, Wilkes Land, Queen Mary Land, Wilhelm II Land, Princess Elizabeth Land, and Mac Roberstson Land.

It has been twelve days of threading our way through treacherous iceberg dotted coastline, skirting pack ice, dodging growlers and contending with huge swells, dense fog, high winds, rain, sleet, snow in flurries and in blizzards and hail.

It is beautiful. The coast of Antarctica is one of the most mysterious and beautiful places on the planet with icebergs boasting every shade of blue imaginable framed by the white brilliance of packed snow.  There are seals, penguins, birds galore, and there are whales, those majestic minds in the water that are the root cause for the troubles down in these remote and hostile waters.

We are here because the whales are here and the Japanese don’t want them here. They prefer them on a platter in a Tokyo sushi bar.

This year however things are a little different. Whereas in years previous we had to cut off the pursuit due to lack of fuel, we now have two ships and one can continue the pursuit as the other returns to a port for fuel and supplies. This means that for the first time in our campaigns we can have a virtually unbroken pursuit and an unbroken pursuit will translate into whale lives saved and reduced revenues for the whalers.

Every day the whalers are on the run is a good day for the whales and they have been on the run now for two weeks, and we intend to keep them on the run until the end of the whaling season in March.

Sometimes success can be achieved by just being there, and we are hard on the heels of this floating slaughterhouse and her posse of hunter killer harpoon boats.

There will be further clashes and more than likely there will be more collisions but when all is said and done, the best results come from doing nothing.  It is in the hot pursuit that lives are saved.

Who would have thought?

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is a controversial organization and because of this we expect to receive a wide spectrum of response ranging from complete support for our efforts to total condemnation. Our list of detractors includes Japanese whalers, those who support Japanese whaling, those who oppose whaling as well as our tactics, and those who oppose whaling, support our tactics but don’t support us on the grounds that we are not “aggressive” enough. The reasons are numerous, sometimes thought out, but most times not. Not that it matters, we don’t do what we do for people and we don’t really care what people think about us. Our clients are the species of the sea: whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, fish, seabirds, crabs and mollusks, krill etc.

But every once in awhile an article comes to our attention which is so ridiculously bizarre that we can do nothing else but view it with a detached amusement. The article below from the Christian News Wire is such an article. Short on facts, long on unsubstantiated accusations, and totally bizarre with its silly conclusions.

Receiving this gem of nut bar journalism today, I could not wait to post it in the crew’s mess room for their enjoyment.

It turns out you see that the only reason we are down here in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary protecting whales is because we are fundamentalist extremist disciples of Charles Darwin. Yes sir, Charles Darwin is to blame for this mess because he started people down the road of thinking for themselves, instead of blindly following the dictates and guidance of a silly over-rated book written by a gang of chauvinistic sheep herding thugs in the desert a few thousand years ago.

Anyhow, the article is attached below with my comments correcting the errors in fact and pointing out the contradictions of the author.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has a permanent base of operations in the Galapagos where we work in cooperation with the Galapagos National Park rangers and the Ecuadorian Federal Police to uphold conservation regulations and laws against poachers operating in the Galapagos Marine Reserve.

From: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/7833512721.html

The Whaling Controversy Resolved: 'Mysterious Islands' DVD Shows Sea Shepherd Pirates to Be Darwinian Extremists

By Gregg Wooding

SAN ANTONIO, TX, Jan. 15 /Christian Newswire/ -- Last week's clash between the Japanese whaling ship, the 'Shonan Maru' and the 'Ady Gil', a vessel owned and manned by the eco-terrorist group Sea Shepherd, highlights an animal rights battle that was launched when Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835 -- a theme explored in detail on a featurette of 'The Mysterious Islands', a newly-released documentary that debunks the conclusions Darwin reaching during his famous voyage of the Beagle. The featurette -- entitled 'The Galapagos Whaling Controversy: A Christian Perspective' -- takes environmental groups such as Sea Shepherd, Greenpeace, and PETA head on, and shows how their anti-hunting and worshipful view of animals flows directly from Darwin's theory of evolution.

Captain Paul Watson: The accusation that Sea Shepherd is an eco-terrorist organization is based on a strategy explained in my book Earthforce! where I point out that one of the fundamental strategies of propaganda is to repeat a lie so often that people begin to believe it. Accusations that Sea Shepherd is an eco-terrorist organization have no basis in fact. Since the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was founded in 1977, we have not been convicted of a single felony crime, we have never been sued, and we have never caused a single injury. What we do is to oppose illegal activities like the poaching of whales from a Whale Sanctuary. Wooding also continues to use the term “animal rights” although Sea Shepherd is a marine conservation organization.

I found it interesting to discover how our activities come from Darwin’s theory of evolution, although Wooding should be corrected on that also because it is no longer a “theory” of evolution, it is a scientifically proven understanding of evolution.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society opposes Japanese whaling because it is illegal. Japan is violating international conservation law in numerous ways. We don’t worship whales; we work to protect them from poachers.

"The Galapagos Islands were not only a once-great international whaling hub, but --thanks to Charles Darwin -- this archipelago holds the distinction of being the birthplace of the modern animal rights movement," noted Doug Phillips, Executive Producer of 'The Mysterious Islands'.

Captain Paul Watson: Thanks to unrestricted whaling, the great whales were eradicated from the waters around the Galapagos. They are now slowly recovering. I don’t think that Charles Darwin had any idea about animal rights. His work focused on the reality of evolution. He was a scientist.

"Darwin argued that man is not a unique creature supernaturally created by God in His image with a responsibility to exercise dominion over creation, but he is simply another animal," Phillips stated. "Radical environmentalists embrace this as their starting point and thus view man of no greater significance than a fish, a frog, or a whale."

Captain Paul Watson: Human beings are not unique. After some three billion years of evolution on this planet, humans appeared in the last million years and the myth of God was created sometime during the last ten thousand years. Human beings are, in fact, animals. We are not some sort of semi-divine supernatural being. If anything we are merely overly conceited naked apes that have become divine legends in our own minds.

The fact is that the ecological law of diversity dictates that diversity of species is essential for the survival of each species within that diversity. Humans are equal to other species for the simple reason that if the other species were removed from the eco-systems that people inhabit, humans could not survive. Mutual survival bestows equality on all other species. We need them to exist. Without them we cannot exist therefore their importance is equal to our own within the context of the habitats that we occupy. There is nothing radical about nature. What is radical is the idea that we are above and apart from nature and this is an idea that emerged relatively late in human evolution. It is this idea that created religion and religion is little more than a form of collective mass psychosis, the fanatical belief in fantasy worlds that have no basis in reality.

"The Galapagos Whaling Controversy: A Christian Perspective" takes specific aim at Sea Shepherd, an animal rights group founded by Paul Watson who previously helped start Greenpeace before being ousted from their board due to his extreme tactics.

Captain Paul Watson: I am honestly flattered to be the main protagonist in this absurd documentary. However the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not an animal rights organization - we are a marine conservation anti-poaching organization.

"The liberal news media and Discovery Channel's popular reality show, Whale Wars, has sought to portray Paul Watson and his fellow Sea Shepherd cronies as folk heroes as they have repeatedly engaged in acts of terror on the high seas," Phillips continued. "Watson's recent charge of piracy against the 'Shonan Maru' is disingenuous doublespeak, as he has boasted of sinking numerous whaling vessels from Iceland to Antarctica over the years, visibly displaying images of the ships he has sunk on the side of his own renegade vessels. Watson has personally been convicted of sabotage many times over -- he's the real pirate in this whole affair.

Captain Paul Watson: If we have engaged in a single act of terrorism then we should be charged with a crime. The fact is that we have never been charged with a terrorist act let alone convicted. I was invited to give a lecture at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Virginia in August 2009 where one agent remarked that Sea Shepherd walked a very fine line with the law. My answer was, and he did not dispute it, is that there is nothing wrong with walking a fine line as long as the laws are not broken. Sea Shepherd has never sunk a ship in Antarctica. Sea Shepherd has scuttled unmanned poaching vessels in Norway, Iceland, and Spain and not one of them resulted in a felony conviction because they were operating illegally. The statement that I have been personally convicted of sabotage many times over is simply a lie. I have never been convicted of a single felony in my entire life. But again, if the lie is repeated that I have, people begin to believe it.

"Watson has declared that 'there's nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write the history,'" Phillips noted. "He has also said that 'If you don't know an answer, a fact, a statistic, then ... make it up on the spot.' Watson is legendary as a yarn-spinner, and the news media has largely overlooked his chronic duplicity."

Captain Paul Watson: I am a university lecturer and in my UCLA honors course on Science, Technology, and Ethics for the 21st Century I did say that history has demonstrated that “there’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write the history.” I did indeed say that and it is a historical truth but it is not my opinion, it is merely an observation of fact. The writer has chosen to take the quote out of context in a deliberate attempt to demonize me. On the second quote that is also an observation of fact. I think it was President Ronald Reagan who put that particular media strategy into effect, a tradition now utilized by the FOX network every day.

The methods of the eco-terrorist group Sea Shepherd are well-documented and include the use of limpet mines to scuttle whaling boats, hurling bottles of foul-smelling butyric acid on rival ships, and rifle fire, among other violent tactics.

Captain Paul Watson: All Sea Shepherd tactics utilize only non-lethal approaches. Yes, we use rotten butter stink bombs and because rotten butter is butyric acid, just as milk is lactic acid, the use of the word “acid” is designed to make the substance sound deadly when in fact beer is more acidic than butyric acid. We don’t use explosives or firearms. The writer attempts to underscore this accusation with the description of “well documented” without providing or referring to the documentation he so casually mentions.

"Watson speaks regularly of the 'virus of humanity' and has declared openly that 'in this war between our species and the others . . . I side most passionately with them against us, a proud traitor to my species,'" Phillips observed. "Watson has also stated that 'earthworms are far more valuable than people' and that he stands 'in opposition to . . . those parasites who believe the Earth is here to serve human interests.' His conclusion is a frightening one: 'We need to radically and intelligently reduce human population to fewer than one billion.'"

Captain Paul Watson: I have said that the effect that human society has on the ecology of the planet is similar to the virus AIDS because we are eroding the immune systems of the planet through the destruction of bio-diversity. The fact is that earthworms are more important than people from an ecological perspective for the simple reason that earthworms can survive without people but people will not be able to survive without earthworms. People are dependent on earthworms; earthworms are not dependent upon humans. I do believe that the Earth was not created to serve the self-interest of a single species our own and my comment on population is simply to point out that the carrying capacity of the planet is not sufficient to support increasing human populations. By saying intelligently I was advocating voluntary reduction in births - not extermination camps as some rabid Christian writers have stated.

Phillips concluded: "Watson's anti-human worldview flows from a radical brand of Darwinism that is at war with God. He and his Sea Shepherd associates reject the biblical teaching that man is God's appointed steward over the creation. They advance their terrorist agenda with a twisted religious ferocity that shows that they worship the creature rather than the Creator."

Captain Paul Watson: I am not at war with God. I don’t believe in God. This is an absurd statement and the writer may as well have accused me of being at war with Santa Claus or Darth Vader. I do indeed reject the biblical fantasies of a monkey God figure in the sky and if there were such a thing, he certainly has not demonstrated much expertise in stewardship considering the mass extinction of species we are presently responsible for. What is especially amusing is the writer accuses us of have a “twisted religious ferocity”.

We are a secular organization without any ties to any religion. We don’t worship whales; we are trying to keep them from being illegally slaughtered. This is equivalent to saying that a policeman worships money when he tries to stop a bank robbery.

"The Mysterious Islands" film -- which comes with 'The Galapagos Whaling Controversy' bonus feature -- was shot last year on the Galapagos Islands as the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his landmark book, On the Origins of Species. The film recently enjoyed successful premiers in ten cities across the nation, from Tampa to Birmingham, with opening night audiences of more than 2,500 and 1,300 moviegoers respectively.

Captain Paul Watson: Numbers do not make the truth. Scientific observation validates the truth.

The film retraces Darwin's steps on the Galapagos and shows how he erred in his observations concerning the amazing and unusual creatures that inhabit these islands. The film's conclusion: that the Galapagos Islands are a showcase for God's creation, not a laboratory for evolution, as Darwin maintained.

Captain Paul Watson: There have been many studies since Charles Darwin most notably the book, The Beak of the Finch, which demonstrates the validity of natural selection.

Final questions: If there is a God why would he have created Charles Darwin to debunk him? If there is a God why is allowing his “showcase” in the Galapagos to be destroyed by poachers and human encroachment?

By Steve Roest

On January 6, 2010, in blatant disregard for the safety of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society crew, the Japanese whaling vessel Shonan Maru No. 2 attempted to sink the Sea Shepherd vessel Ady Gil off the coast of Antarctica.

Australian, New Zealand, and Japanese government officials call for the crews on both sides to remain calm. I can tell these government officials that there is no need to ask our anti-whaling heroes to be calm, they have been calm and resolute, and will remain so.

But I join the chorus of voices that ask the Japanese whale killers to stop their deliberate attempts to ram and sink our vessels, and kill our crew.

For anyone who has seen the video clips, and millions upon millions of people have, it is clear that the 500 ton Shonan Maru No. 2, aimed at high speed for the 16 ton Sea Shepherd speedboat Ady Gil, and at the last moments, to make certain of a collision, steered hard to starboard to deliberately cut our vessel in two.

There is not a doubt in anyone’s mind that if one of our crewmembers had been in the front part of the Ady Gil when it was struck, they would have been killed instantly. It was a miracle that most of the crew, who obviously had no idea they were about to be rammed, were out on deck securing equipment when the Shonan Maru No. 2 slammed into them.

In an incredible display of cold and calculating violent illegal action, immediately after ramming the Ady Gil, the Shonan Maru  No. 2 directed its high pressure water cannons at the stricken Sea Shepherd mariners, whilst ignoring the Ady Gil’s distress calls.

The Ady Gil has been damaged beyond repair, and after repeated attempts by Sea Shepherd’s new ship the Bob Barker to tow the damaged remains of the Ady Gil to the nearest port to asses what might be salvaged, the vessel has broken loose from our tow lines yet again and we have been hit with the gut-wrenching realization that we have no other option than to let it sink. Fortunately we were able to remove all fuel and oils from the Ady Gil before it began to take on too much water, thus preventing a catastrophic leak into the fragile marine environment. Sea Shepherd notified the relevant marine agencies about the sinking Ady Gil and has complied in full with all maritime requirements. All the while, the Japanese whaling fleet continues to ignore our calls for assistance.

This week the Japanese whaling business has sent undercover operatives to hire aircraft in Australia and fly illegally in Australian airspace to hunt for the Sea Shepherd ships, it has deliberately rammed and ultimately sunk one of our vessels off the coast of Antarctica, and it now seems clear that it has this week also focused an international cyber attack on our website to attempt to block us from putting out the truth about what happened and receiving donations from our supporters.

Sea Shepherd demands that New Zealand arrest the Shonan Maru No. 2 and its crew, and that the Japanese whaling industry repay the $2M in losses that resulted from the deliberate sinking of the Ady Gil by its ships.

These attacks are certainly a hefty financial blow to Sea Shepherd; we have lost millions of dollars as a result of the assaults upon us. But we will not flinch from our task to save the whales and the oceans in which they live. We will not pull back from our direct actions to save the whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, and we will not pull back from our projects protecting the seals, dolphins, sharks and tuna, despite the fact that our funds are have been so drastically reduced. We will go to our supporters, and with their help we will grow bigger and stronger. We will not hesitate in our duty to save the oceans from the mercenaries of profit and greed that seek to destroy the natural world.

Editorial from The Wellington (New Zealand)

OPINION: Blame who you will for the collision that sank the Ady Gil, but the person who should hang his head in shame is Murray McCully.

Though the Member of Parliament for Albany, Mr McCully lives in Wellington. We expect better of a Wellingtonian.

The Sea Shepherd anti-whaling protesters, who engineered the potentially lethal confrontations, and Japan's Institute of Cetaceous Research, which seems dedic-ated to finding out how much money it can make from hunting whales to extinction, have exchanged accusations and will no doubt continue to do so.

In an ideal world, the culprit would be flushed out in the wash of official investigations.

Maritime New Zealand Authority and the Transport Accident Investigation Commission are both legally charged with looking into incidents involving New Zealand-registered ships. Their Japanese counterparts have similar responsibilities.

Yet our Minister of Foreign Affairs seems more concerned that the incident could strain New Zealand-Japanese relat-ions and has made judgmental pronouncements about the collision, blaming the victims, who were nearly killed.

Mr McCully said New Zealand citizens who had "clearly been behaving in a manner that has put life at risk", had gone into the southern ocean looking for trouble and there was nothing he could do to stop them except "urge them to improve their conduct".

He has also dwelt at length on Sea Shepherd's obstructive practices, such as its use of lasers and propeller-fouling ropes, but has omitted to mention the water cannon and military hardware the whalers have employed.

Mr McCully has clearly taken a side and it has been against the New Zealanders. Broadcast video footage shows the Japanese ship Shohan Maru powering into the Ady Gil, though one maritime safety expert has said there was fault on both sides.

The court of public opinion will no doubt condemn one or the other of the two skippers.

However, it is difficult to believe the authorities charged with officially investigating the near-tragedy will be allowed to reach an impartial judgement.

Justice Peter Mahon was once pilloried by the Muldoon government for finding fault with the national airline in an earlier Antarctic tragedy, the Erebus disaster.

He was publicly humiliated for nothing more than diligently conducting his inquiry and daring to find fault with a government corporation.

In the immediate aftermath of the Erebus crash, we heard similar words from Mr Muldoon as he sought to pre-empt Justice Mahon's investigation.

To some extent the New Zealanders concerned have placed themselves in harm's way, but that does not excuse the Foreign Affairs Minister from representing the interests of his country and his countrymen.

Japan may be one of the world's biggest powers and New Zealand one of the smallest, but that makes strong representation even more important.

Mr McCully was correct in saying he could do nothing to safeguard those who chose to put themselves at risk.

Irrespective of that, if Japanese nationals have acted with illegal hostility they must be called on it.

So far Mr McCully has neglected to do that and has done his best to pre-empt the investigations. Worse, his words have been reprehensibly pro-Japanese and anti-New Zealand.

original article

By Captain Paul Watson

What a way to begin the New Year!

My crew and I quietly departed from Hobart harbor in the Australian state of Tasmania at 1800 Hours on December 31st into the teeth of a most welcome raging gale.

The blue moon could only be seen occasionally as the sky flashed with broad sheets of lighting as grey black storm clouds scudded across a sky ruby red and, fiery pinkish orange with the settling embers of the setting sun.

After a night of wild pitching, tossing, bucking and heavy rolling, the morning found the Steve Irwin’s crew working our way towards the border of the Australian Economic Zone. Somewhere on that border was the Japanese whaling fleet security vessel, Shonan Maru No. 2, the same ship that had been on our tail since December 8th when we left Fremantle.

We had gone to Hobart to lose that tail and to take on fuel and supplies and there was no time for New Year festivities or rest. We had to break through if we were to find the fleet.

Far to the south our fast interceptor vessel the Ady Gil is hot on the heels of the main body of the Japanese whaling fleet. Our task was to get past the guard of the Shonan Maru No. 2 and close in on the main body of the whaling fleet to support the Ady Gil.

Once across the line, we harnessed the protection of a second incoming storm and rode the massive swells southward shielded by screaming sheets of wind driven rain and cloaked in the swirling mists of stinging salt spray. It wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t much fun, but it was effective.

We slipped past the Shonan Maru No. 2 and we are now on our way South with a bone in our teeth and a living gale still hot in pursuit. But better a gale than a Japanese whaling fleet security ship.

Whales are being slaughtered in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and every day we are prevented from disrupting the fleet, more whales die. Without the security vessel on our stern, we now have a good chance of finding and closing in on the fleet.

This is not going to be an easy season. The Japanese government has invested a great deal of money and time in their efforts to stop us this year. Two ships have been deployed whose sole purpose is to intercept us and to prevent us from confronting the main body of the fleet.

A great deal of money is being spent to oppose Sea Shepherd’s efforts overall. In addition to the deployment of the security ships, the whaling ships have been armed with defensive measures including long range acoustical devices (LRADs), anti-boarding spikes, netting, concussion grenades, and firearms. On shore Japan is employing expensive public relations firms and they have hired lobbyists to harass the Australian, American, Canadian, and Dutch governments. Japan has even hired people to flood the internet forums with disinformation accusing us of being terrorists, racists and extremists.   All this for an industry that only survives because of massive Japanese government subsidies.

But despite this, every year we get stronger and more effective. Our record remains unblemished.  This is our 6th season of interventions and we have not caused a single injury, nor have we been charged with any crimes or violations and we have not been sued.

The reason for this is simple. We are not breaking any laws; we are simply upholding international conservation law against a massive poaching industry.

Down on the ice edge, our fast trimaran Ady Gil continues to search for the fleet and we have some new surprises in store for the whalers this year.

I am confident that once again we will disrupt the illegal operations of the Japanese whaling fleet and that once again we will cost them their profits. Our objective is to sink them economically, to bankrupt them, and to expose their shameful slaughter of the whales to the world.

It is not easy to take on the might of an entire nation? Especially a nation as economically powerful as Japan. It is not easy to voyage every year to the bottom of the world through bone jarring seas and the howling winds and huge swells of the Southern Ocean. It is not easy to skirmish with bureaucrats trying to remove our flags, our registrations, our tax status, and who constantly try to knock us down with petty regulations and trivial paperwork. It is not easy to be down in these hostile waters battling a ruthless enemy while the internet spews disinformation in a constant propaganda effort to discredit and condemn us.

It is never easy but if it were easy, even Greenpeace would be down here.

The point is that we are down here alone, fighting superior odds armed only with a passionate courage that will allow us to weather any obstacle, natural or manmade. We are down here, not to make friends, nor to impress anyone. We are down here representing our clients - the great whales.

If every human being on the planet rose up against us, we would still be here to defend the whales.

The greatest challenge has always been to explain just how important it is that we stop this slaughter.

Humankind has already exterminated over 90% of the great whales. The history of whaling is the blackest and most obscene record of abject cruelty that our species has ever inflicted upon any other species in the ocean.

Whales are the most intelligent, most evolved, most socially complex sentient beings on the planet. If we cannot defend them, how can we ever hope to defend the other species in the oceans? If the whales die, the death of the oceans will follow and when the oceans die, we will all die.

The war to save the whales is in reality a war to save humankind from the most deadly threat to our own survival and that threat is ourselves.

My crew has come from all over the world, from France and Estonia, from Australia and North America, from Africa and South America, from the Netherlands and Japan. Men and woman of passion and dedicated to risking their lives to do what our governments lack the economic and political will to do - to enforce the law!

The daunting vastness of the Southern Ocean is surpassed only by it’s ferocity, the swells called the Cape Rollers are the highest to be found anywhere in the world, and these swells conspire with the wind, the ice, and the frigid air to create obstacles that challenge the instincts, skills and experience of the greatest of mariners.

As I look forward from our bridge window, I can see our decks awash with tons of foaming frigid water, cascading in torrents from the forepeak deck onto the boat deck. The sea is torn open with white gnarly gashes as the slashing wind flogs the tops of the swells and scatters foam tossed brine higher than our masts. Seawater splashes in buckets over our windows overwhelming the wipers and anything not tied down is tossed about chaotically inside of the ship.

Added to this challenge is the fact that we will soon be tackling once again with ship, superior both in strength and speed, and crewed by men with the blackest hearts ever to sail the seas - the killers of the great whales. These are men who slaughter for profit, without mercy or remorse and men quite prepared to use violence to stop anyone who gets in their brutish way.

The whalers also have the advantage of knowing that even should they kill or injure any of us, their government in Japan will justify and defend their violence in the name of commerce.

Against this we must take every precaution to not injure any of them, nor to break any laws knowing that despite this, no matter what we do, our governments will condemn us for daring to interfere with Japanese commerce, for daring to do what they have not got the integrity or the courage to do.

But the support of governments is not important when we enjoy the incredible support of people around the world who wish to see the whales defended. This is especially true of Australia where the citizens have provided a support base to make our interventions possible.

For the next week we will make our way steadily southward towards the pack ice in search of the only commercial factory operation actively engaged in the Antarctic Treaty Zone. We are not tracking down the whaling fleet to protest, to hang banners, or to scold these killers. Our intention is to simply intervene against their criminal operations to oppose and stop their unlawful poaching of endangered species.

In a world where citizens around the world rally to rescue whales stranded on beaches or entangled in nets, the Japanese are targeting 935 protected Minke whales, 50 endangered Humpbacks and 50 endangered Fin whales. 1035 whales are facing a death sentence and our job is to win reprieve for as many as possible.

For all those who have supported us to make Operation Waltzing Matilda possible, we are very grateful. For those who would like to support our efforts please do so, we need your help. Follow our progress on our website at www.Seashepherd.org <http://www.Seashepherd.org>

Yes, what a way to begin a New Year!

We would have it no other way. Give us the storms and the dangers, for the reward we seek, and we will reap, is the satisfaction of saving the lives of some of the most intelligent and magnificent creatures on our planet. To save just one would be an achievement but we have already saved thousands and we will save thousands more and that makes all of us feel damn good about what we do.

And for those of you who make it possible for us to save these lives, you also share in this satisfaction. The whales need us and we need you and together we are all achieving solid results and together we are making a real difference in helping to defend and protect our oceans from the greed of those who are ignorantly and arrogantly intent upon destroying life in our oceans.

For the Whales and the Oceans-

Captain Paul Watson

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

I remember the day that Kevin Rudd was elected back in November 2007. I was up on the Gold Coast in Queensland that morning and the news that Kevin Rudd had won the election was greeted with an overwhelming feeling of hope. Later that month, Peter Garrett was appointed Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts.

Finally Australia had a government that would do something about illegal Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. We had Peter Garrett’s word for it. “A Rudd government would end the killing of whales in the Southern Ocean.”

That is what he said and a great many people in Australia had faith that he would. After all this was Peter Garrett of a band called Midnight Oil, and not just some run of the mill politician. We could trust Peter, we thought. He was one of us – an environmentalist.

That was over two years ago and nothing has changed. Japanese whalers continue to kill whales whenever they want, however they want, and wherever they want.

Meanwhile Peter Garrett lives in a fantasyland where he believes all he needs to do is click his heels together and mutter slogans like, “we have appointed a whaling envoy.” Or “we may take international legal action” and the whales will be saved.

But the question must now be seriously asked. Does the Rudd government have any intention of doing anything about this issue? Was it all electioneering posturing and posing to snatch the votes from whale loving Australians who wanted then, and continue to want now, that something actually should be done to end the illegal slaughter of endangered whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary?

During the last two years, Peter Garrett has consistently refused to meet with or talk with any representative from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society including former Australian Environment Minister and now Sea Shepherd Advisor Ian Campbell.

Although I attended the International Whaling Commission meetings in Santiago, Chile in 2008 and in Madeira in 2009, Mr. Garrett refused to speak with us whenever we approached him. He says he wants to resolve this issue but he is not talking to us and his whaling envoy, Sandy Holloway (Former Sydney Olympic Chief), appears to be having a one sided conversation with the Japanese government consisting of them talking and Australia listening.

I wrote another letter to Mr. Garrett on December 17h, 2009 asking if he would be willing to meet with Sea Shepherd Executive Director Steve Roest before Mr. Roest returned to the United Kingdom.

Today I received a reply.

This is the reply and my response to his reply.

From: The Honourable Peter Garrett
Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts

Dear Captain Watson,

Thank-you for your e-mail of 17 December 2009 regarding whale conservation and the critical importance of ending the slaughter of whales in the Southern Ocean. While I am not available to meet with Mr. Roest at this time, I appreciate this opportunity to reiterate the Australian Government’s opposition to commercial and so-called “scientific” whaling.

Captain Paul Watson’s Response: Mr. Garrett says that he is not available to meet with Mr. Roest “at this time.” This begs the question of just when is Mr. Garrett available for a meeting with Sea Shepherd? So far he has not been available to meet for over two years. Instead he appreciates the opportunity to lecture us again.

PG: As you are aware, the Australian Government remains committed to the conservation of whales and the continuation of commercial so-called “scientific” whaling. The Australian government is continuing to engage in constructive efforts to resolve whaling issues diplomatically. If we cannot resolve this matter “diplomatically”, we will take international action.

Captain Paul Watson’s Response:  Mr. Garrett does imply with his quotations that he does not accept the scientific justification for Japanese whaling. The problem is that diplomacy has failed for 23 years to get Japan to stop their illegal activities. As long as Australia and other nations continue to “talk,” Japan continues to kill whales. Diplomacy has worked quite well for Japanese whalers. Diplomacy has utterly failed the whales and the interests of conservation. The time for legal action was yesterday, certainly now and definitely not tomorrow.

Mr. Garrett has been threatening legal action for three years. In January 2008, the Australian Federal Court ordered Japan to cease killing whales in the Australian Antarctic Territorial waters. Japan is now in contempt of an Australian Federal Court order. This is grounds for intervention by Australia.

Mr. Garrett argues that Japan does not recognize Australian sovereignty over the Australian Antarctic Territory. Perhaps he has forgotten that Japan did not recognize Australian sovereignty of Australians over Australia in 1942.

Australia could also insist upon the ending of whaling in trade negotiations. Australian iron ore, uranium, wood chips etc have a market elsewhere in China. Japan needs Australian resources more than Australia needs Japanese markets.

PG: The government position is clear, and it contrasts with the record of the previous Coalition Government who repeatedly dismissed the option of international legal action, refused to monitor the Japanese whaling fleet and oversaw a doubling of the number of whales targeted by the Japan in the Southern Ocean. The previous government’s approach further entrenched divisions within the International Whaling Commission, setting back the prospects for genuine conservation reforms, and all the while an increasing number of whales were targeted in the name of science. This approach should not be repeated.

Captain Paul Watson’s Response: This is an amazing statement. Peter Garrett’s performance for the last two years at the IWC meetings has been pathetically non-progressive. Nothing has been accomplished other than to make the Japanese feel that Australian opposition once so aggressively demonstrated in the person of former Environment Minister Ian Campbell has now faded away into diplomatic babbling doublespeak.

Everything that Peter Garrett has criticized the Howard government for is exactly the position of the Rudd government today. Garrett says that the Howard government dismissed the option of legal action yet what is the difference in dismissing the option and not exercising the option. It has been almost three years of threatening legal action and not taking action.

Garrett says that the Howard government refused to monitor the whaling fleet yet the Rudd government is not monitoring Japanese whaling activities either.

Garrett said that the Howard government entrenched divisions at the IWC. What he is really saying is that the Howard government got in the face of the Japanese with an aggressive no nonsense demand to end whaling. And because the Japanese were upset with Ian Campbell’s strong defense of the whales, Peter Garrett defines this as creating divisions. The fact is that the IWC is not about love, peace and good vibes. It’s about dirty dealing, vote buying, economic threats, and the countries of Japan, Norway, and Iceland telling the rest of the world to go to hell on the issue of whaling. They want to kill whales and anyone who opposes them, they accuse of creating division, conflict and even racism. What Peter Garrett is saying is the Rudd government does not want to overly upset the Japanese. Instead they want to talk, and talk, and talk as the whales continue to suffer and die. Talking is obscene when blood is flowing. Silence the harpoons first and then talk, which is what Australia should be demanding of Japan. Instead, Japan has not budged an inch and the Japanese whalers have the full support, and the Japanese government subsidizes them. The Australian government will not even talk with Australians wanting to defend the whales. In Japan, pirate whalers are treated as heroes and subsidized by the Japanese government. In Australia, pirate whale defenders are treated with contempt by the Australian government.

This was not so under the Howard government when Environment Minister Ian Campbell was very cooperative in communicating with Sea Shepherd over this issue. Under Campbell the office of the Environment Ministry was accessible. Under Garrett the doors have been closed and locked for over two years.

Peter Garrett can thump his chest with all the great and wonderful things he purports to be doing for the whales but from our point of view as whale defenders actively working to shut down illegal Japanese whaling activities in the Southern Ocean, we have not seen any evidence that he is doing anything at all.

PG: I am aware of the recent media reports of incidents involving the Steve Irwin and the Japanese whaling fleet. The government respects the right of individuals and groups to protest peacefully, including on the high seas. At the same time we condemn dangerous and violent activities by any of the parties involved, be it protesters or whalers. The Southern Ocean is a remote and inhospitable region where risk of adverse incidents is high and the capacity for rescue or assistance is low.

Captain Paul Watson’s Response: This is priceless. What we have is a rock star politician telling a sea captain and a crew of sailors that the Southern Ocean is a remote and inhospitable region. Hmm do you think Peter? We had no idea. Wow, thanks Peter, we’ll be extra especially careful from now on, now that we know.

What Peter Garrett has consistently refused to acknowledge is that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not down here protesting whaling. We are down here intervening against illegal whaling activities under the mandate of the World Charter for Nature. We are an anti-poaching organization not a protest organization. We are down here trying to uphold international laws that his government is refusing to uphold or even acknowledge.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has an unblemished record of never injuring anyone nor sustaining an injury or a fatality. The whalers have had three fatalities and numerous injuries. Greenpeace has had fatalities and injuries yet the Minister consistently regards Sea Shepherd as being irresponsible.

As for violence? There is plenty of violence and all of it coming from the whalers and inflicted on the whales. The Japanese whalers are spilling tons of blood into these waters and thousands of whales are dying agonizingly cruel deaths. I wish the Minister would speak up about this violence, and better yet, actually try to do something about it.

PG: I emphasize that the masters of the Sea Shepherd vessels are directly responsible for the actions and safety of all on board, including Australians and we call upon them to ensure that all vessels exercise restraint and ensure that safety on the seas is their highest priority.

Captain Paul Watson’s response: Actually safety on the high seas is our second highest priority. Our first priority is the defense of the whales. As for safety, we have the best safety record of any group operating down here in these waters. We are working with a very big disadvantage. The Japanese are trying to damage our equipment, they are trying to injure and kill us and if they do, their government will justify and defend their actions no matter what the consequences. On the other hand we have to do what we do, ensuring that no one is injured knowing that whatever we do, our governments will condemn us for nonetheless. If whale defenders had the support of our government as much as the whale killers have the support of Japan, we might actually end this charade of “scientific” whaling down here in these waters.

One thing I do know is that politicians blabbing to each other at conferences will not end illegal Japanese whaling. The only language that Japan understands is economic. Sea Shepherd is cutting quotas and negating profits. The government of Australia is talking and talking and talking. Sea Shepherd has saved the lives of over a thousand whales. Peter Garrett has not saved the life of a single whale.

It is sad that the government of Australia is hostile to Sea Shepherd but we do have something better going for us, we have the support of the Australian people. It would be nice to have been able to cooperate with Peter Garrett and we have certainly tried to do so. Peter is now too busy being the Minister of the Environment and therefore cannot meet with the only organization physically battling the illegal Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean.

And thus we continue to defend the whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary by ourselves. Somebody has to do it and if the government of Australia won’t then we have no other option than to continue to intervene directly and aggressively with the Japanese fleet.

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

I have been fighting the cruel sealing industry all of my life. From the day when I was 10 years old and saw a harp seal pup clubbed to death on the beach in New Brunswick, I have pledged to myself to do everything in my power to eradicate the obscene industry of sealing.

The clubbing of seals has no place in the 21st Century. It must be eliminated as an industry and seal populations must be allowed to restore in order to recover the prey-predator balance that has been lost in our oceanic ecosystems.

Five hundred years ago, there were 45 million seals off the Eastern coast of Canada: Harps, Hoods, Greys, Harbour, and Walrus. Today the Walrus has been extirpated and the populations of the other species reduced to less than 10% of their original numbers.

When there were 45 million seals on the Eastern seaboard, there was no shortage of fish. Today, the Northern Cod is virtually extinct and other species have been decimated. The sealing industry contributed to this ecological devastation and recovery of marine ecosystems is not possible unless the practice of sealing is abolished forever.

Thanks to the ban on seal products by the European Parliament, we are hammering the final nails into the coffin of this despicable industry.

Less than 20% of the Canadian seal kill quota was taken in 2009. There is no market for seal products in Europe or the United States, and the movement to abolish seal pelts is being taken up in Russia and other Eastern European nations. Without huge government subsidies, there will be no reason for the baby killers of Eastern Canada to go to the ice in the spring. Canada may give in to the emotional blackmail by the thugs with the clubs, but this kind of wastage of tax dollars will not be tolerated for long in a world where the oceans are so seriously threatened.

Canadian politicians support sealing for the same reason that the Senators of pre-Civil War America supported slavery. Slavery then, like sealing today, made little economic sense and it was viciously cruel and immoral, yet the politicians sold their vote for political favors just as the whores of the Canadian Parliament are doing today.

The international public is becoming increasingly aware that we are destroying our oceans and the occupation of “sealer” and “whaler” is rapidly becoming more and more associated in the minds of much of the public with barbarism and uncivilized behavior.

Years ago, when I accused Newfoundland and Magdalen Island sealers of being baby-killing monsters, people were horrified. I am finding today that more and more people agree with that statement. The sealer is a thug, usually an uneducated and insensitive creature prone to sadistic tendencies. You pretty much have to be a sadist to take a club and bash in a defenseless seal pups head. It’s hardly what one would call a manly or noble pursuit.

We are presently witnessing the death of the sealing industry in Norway, and I for one am overjoyed at the news that I received today that two of the three remaining Norwegian sealing vessels are for sale.

According to a report by Norwegian TV2 this spells the end for Norwegian seal hunting.

The 45 employees of the sealing ships the White Bear and the White Kid have had their jobs terminated.

A historic time for the sealing industry is over, according to Signe Korneliussen, the operations manager of the White Bear.

“With two of the three sealing vessels now being offered for sale, this means in reality a winding up of the Norwegian seal hunting, " said sealing ship owner Jens Petter Kraknes.

Hopefully the third seal-killing vessel will be put on the block soon or conveniently sunk for insurance purposes.

The tragedy is that sealing is being ended because the fishermen and the sealers have been so ruthlessly efficient at their jobs.

The Canadian government is rattling their swords with threats to sue the European Parliament for banning seal products but it’s all posturing. The vote to ban seal products was overwhelming and will not be overturned.

The Canadian government should be investing money in finding alternative employment as a substitute for the glorified welfare program they call the “sealing industry.” The fact is that the seal hunt would have died a natural economic death if not for the handouts to the sealers from reluctant Canadian taxpayers.

In the meantime, I am gratified to see more and more Canadian longliners hauled up onto the shore to rot. The sealers can no longer even sell their floating abattoirs because the bottom has been knocked out of their dirty little industry.

My lifelong ambition has been to rid the world of whaling and sealing and I believe that we will be able to realize that dream and that we will soon be able to drop these two barbaric industries into the rubbish heap of history along with slavery.

Japan's Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada

* From: The Australian

* December 11, 2009 12:00AM

Edited transcript of an interview on Thursday between Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada and The Australian and ABC

Question: The most frequent cause of diplomatic tension between Japan and Australia is over Japan's scientific whaling program. What is the Hatoyama government's policy view of scientific whaling and of supporting it by government subsidies and public loans and having the programme providing positions for former bureaucrats?

Katsuya Okada: First of all, with regards to this issue, I think we should try to discuss this issue in calm, not emotional way. Because our ancestors, we have a tradition here in Japan where we have been eating whale meat. Of course it would be a different story if it were endangered species which are on the verge of extinction. But if not, I think the average Japanese would like to consume whale meat into the future.

Meanwhile in the West you might not have a culture to consume whale meat, but I think food is an important element of cultures and therefore there is a need to mutually respect and recognize each others' culture.

There might be some things that the Australians would eat but the Japanese don't, so this again is the culture of yours and European nations that should be respected. I think we should mutually respect that point and from there start this type of discussion.

Captain Paul Watson: Mr. Okada admits with this statement that the real reason whales are being killed is for consumption and not so-called scientific research. I do not believe that it is wrong to be emotional about the slaughter of a magnificent sentient being. This kind of attitude is what allowed for the atrocities against human beings in the second world war. When emotions are denied then all sorts of horrors become allowable. Mr. Okada is wrong when he says there is a Japanese tradition of eating whale meat. A few villages did eat whale for centuries but the average Japanese did not. Shore based commercial whaling was set up in Japan in 1911 by the Norwegians and it was the American General Douglas MacArthur who established the modern Antarctic pelagic whaling fleets.

The West did have a culture of killing whales. The Yankee whaling fleet was the largest whaling fleet in the world yet America is now passionately opposed to the killing of whales. Australia gave up whaling in 1978 and is now the most passionate nation in the world in opposing it.

Japan does not respect our passion for living whales so why would we be expected to respect their so-called tradition of killing whales?

Japanese whaling is barbaric and a ruthless legacy of the past and has no place in the 21st Century.

Question: So there is no policy review (by the new government)?

Katsuya Okada: We do not think that there is a need for a policy review at this point of time.

Captain Watson: I believe the way to end whaling is to bankrupt the industry and that is why we interfere with their killing operations. Because of Sea Shepherd, Japan has registered financial losses for three years in a row. We are cutting their kill quotas and thus their profits.

Question: What about the structure of the whaling industry, government support and subsidies and amakudari (jobs provided to former government bureaucrats)?

Katsuya Okada: I think there might a bit of exaggeration to what you just described. You mentioned amakudari and we are opposed to amakudari. It is not my understanding that there are many amakudari cases in regard to scientific whaling. There might be some but is not my understanding there are many. But if there are some things that need to be corrected it needs to be corrected.

As I mentioned we should respect the food culture of each other, and just because it's whaling and "everything regarding whaling is no good" is unacceptable, that is my thinking.

When I met with your Foreign Minister Mr. Smith, I said to him when I described the situation: 'For the Japanese, whaling is equivalent to the Australian beef’. I may have overstated, maybe I shouldn't have said that.

Captain Watson: I think it would be more accurate to compare Australian beef to Japanese Kobe beef. No abattoir in the world would tolerate the cruelty to cows that the Japanese inflict upon the whales. Last year we filmed a Minke whale thrashing about in the water and its own blood, in agony for twenty-five minutes as the whalers fired round after round into its convulsing body with high-powered rifles. Mr. Okada has obviously not seen footage of the horror that his harpoons inflict upon these creatures. Our position is that yes, everything about whaling is no good. It is a barbaric tradition as outdated as other economic activities like slavery.

What Mr. Okada is ignoring however is that Japanese whaling is illegal. His whalers are nothing more than poachers. They are targeting endangered whales in an established whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on whaling and in violation of the Antarctic Treaty. They are also in contempt of an Australian Federal Court order for continuing to kill whales in the Australian Antarctic Territory.

Guest Commentary by Kurt Lieber, Sea Shepherd Board of Directors

Bluefin Tuna (BFT) are one of the fastest fish on this planet. They are similar in quickness to the cheetah. Only this is achieved by an animal that can weigh up to 1,500 pounds. BFT swim the temperate zones of the world’s oceans and have the unique characteristic of being a warm-blooded fish. This allows them to inhabit areas of the ocean that are very cold.

Very few people have ever seen them while diving or snorkeling, as they typically inhabit deep waters. Monterey Bay Aquarium has several individuals in one of their exhibits, and there you can get a glimpse of how magnificent they truly are. Nature has produced a powerful rocket with fins and gills. They can reach speeds of up to 55 mph, live up to 30 years, and reach maturity at 8 years. (1) (3)

BFT are one of the top predators of the seas, they eat just about anything and travel great distances to find their prey. Through tagging programs they have been found feeding from the surface down to 3,000 feet.

There are 3 distinct populations of BFT:

• Western Atlantic Bluefin (Gulf of Mexico): Critically Endangered
• Eastern Atlantic Bluefin (Mediterranean): Endangered
• Southern Bluefin (Australia and the Indian Ocean): Critically Endangered (Extremely high risk with extinction in the wild)

One little noticed side affect of diminishing BFT are the rise in the numbers of the fish that they used to prey on. For instance, the Humbolt squid used to be found mainly in the Pacific waters off of Mexico and South America. In recent years they have been expanding their range and are now found all along the west coast of North America, all the way to Alaska. BFT used to keep their numbers in check. Humbolt squid are voracious eaters and are causing havoc with the disappearing salmon and other mid-sized fish. Divers have been harassed by them in Southern California.

It is estimated that a BFT has a one in four million chance of reaching adulthood. (1) But with humans insatiable appetite for their flesh, their chances are even less than that.

Japan consumes 80% of BFT that are caught every year. They employ their own fishing vessels as well as buy from the world’s fishing fleets, whether legally or illegally caught. One fish sold for $173,000 US recently. With that kind of financial incentive, it is impossible to expect common sense to reign. Governments have proven to be incapable of putting a stop to this carnage due to the deep pockets of the fishing industry, and corruption is rampant.

The governing body that sets limits on the amount and location of tuna to be caught is called the International Commission for the Conservation of Tuna (ICCAT). This commission is as effective in regulating the killing of tuna as the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) was in overseeing the overfishing of Cod off the Newfoundland coast.

You may recall that Sea Shepherd successfully chased a fleet of Cuban trawlers off the Grand Banks in 1994, for which Captain Paul Watson was arrested and put on trial for interfering with commercial fishing. Years later he was acquitted, but it was too late for the cod. The catches were down so low (1% of historic levels) (3) that the DFO had to declare the fishery closed, saying that they would re-open it in two years. Now here we are 15 years later and the cod population has still not recovered, and the fishery is still closed to commercial fishing.

Carl Safina, who wrote extensively about the plight of BFT in his book “Song for the Blue Ocean,” appropriately called ICCAT the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.

Despite repeated warnings from their own scientists, ICCAT consistently refuses to reduce the amount of Tuna that are allowed to be taken. At their most recent meeting in July 2009, they voted to put NO restrictions on the catch of Atlantic Bluefin tuna. It is estimated that these fish are at 2 % of their population size from 1940. (2) This is a quote from an article put out by Reuters after this meeting:

“ICCAT estimates the current level of fishing is three times higher than it should be, threatening to cut the spawning population to a fifth of its size in 1970.”

BFT are caught by just about any fishing method imaginable: longline, hook and line, fish pens, gill nets, drift nets, and purse seine nets. The Mediterranean population is the one that is in the worst shape. There are 23 countries that the fish migrate past, and each one has their commercial and recreational fishermen hunting them.

In the case of BFT, there can be no distinction between commercial and recreational fishing, since even individual anglers promptly sell their victims to the highest bidder, with the Japanese providing the ice packed coffin and a quick one way flight to Japan.

Europeans have been hunting BFT as far back as the Roman Empire. They were so abundant that fish traps were constructed in the Mediterranean, all along their migration path. You could say the entire Med is one big fish trap. There is only a nine mile gap between Spain and Gibraltar. Any marine organism that migrates out of the Med has to traverse through a gauntlet of hooks, nets, fish pens and harpoons that are strategically placed to assure little or no fish make it out alive.

This is not only tragic for the Eastern BFT, but the Western populations suffer as well. Through satellite tracking it has been found that these two populations swim together, with some making the trek from one side of the Atlantic to the other, then back, in one year. So, that means even if the quota’s being set by ICCAT were being enforced in the Med (which they are not), they would still be catching animals from the Western population.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that these “quotas” are being enforced. There is a lot of illegal and unreported fishing of BFT. It has been estimated that 50% of the BFT catch is unreported. (1)

Libya has opened up their 1,300 mile coastline to over 200 fishing vessels from all nations that will take a full 60% of all the BFT taken in the Med: 35,000 tons! The animals will be towed to fish pens (fish farms) in Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Turkey and Egypt. Most of this will be illegal, amounting to 200% more than the scientific community deems a sustainable take.

This brings up another issue: fish farms. These are farms in name only; they do not “grow” anything but profits. The animals are taken from the wild, held in densely packed enclosures until they are fat enough to be killed. Fish farming has a proven track record of causing many environmental ills.

Because the animals are in such tight quarters they are susceptible to diseases. To protect them from this, the “farmers” put high doses of antibiotics into the food that they feed the fish. This then accumulates in the bodies of the animals which are then passed on to the consumer in the form of many cancer causing illnesses.

These “farms” are just like feed lots that we use for cows and pigs. They become highly polluted from all the excrement, excess food accumulates directly below the pens, and parasites become rampant. This results in dead zones in, under, and around the sites. In addition any wild animals that swim past these areas become infected with the parasites.

As an example, it has been found that sea lice proliferate around salmon “farms”, which are typically placed where oceans and rivers converge, exactly where migrating salmon travel. All it takes to kill a young salmon is three or more sea lice. The mortality rate in these areas is as high as 95%. With many being found with upwards of 25 sea lice on them. The lice literally suck the life out of the young salmon.

“Farming” is a very wasteful way to utilize the seas. To raise one pound of salmon you need to feed them three pounds of wild fish. For cod the ratio is 1:5. For BFT the rate is an astronomical, 1:20. (1)

We will not “farm” our way out of this dilemma. The true way to allow the oceans to rebound is to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPA). This means zones where no fishing is allowed. There are numerous examples of how quickly these zones react to no take.

One example can be found in Scotland. In 2000 they created a no take zone of about three square miles. There was an adjacent area where there were no fishing restrictions. Scientists studied both areas for 7 years. Within 5 years the lobster population had grown by 700% within the no take zone. This resulted in not only more lobster, but individual lobster size had increased by up to 300%. At the end of the 7 year study, the lobsters had started to migrate out of their area and there the lobster fishermen had laid their traps.

As would be expected, the area with no restrictions had no increase.

Even in area’s where there is reduced fishing effort, there are profound results. The area of the George’s Banks has seen a 500% increase in Haddock, 1,400% increase in Scallops and 50% more cod. This happened over a 6 year period just by closing it to trawlers and dredgers. The results would be much more substantive if this were an MPA. (2)

Back to Tuna Protection

In 1993 a voluntary management system was agreed to by Australia, New Zealand, and Japan to protect the Southern Bluefin Tuna. This was called the Convention for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT). In time, Korea and Taiwan joined the group. Yearly meetings were held, where stock assessments were discussed and quota’s established. Then in ’98 Japan started an “experimental research” program that allowed them to take an additional 1,400 tons. Sound familiar? Does scientific research whaling ring a (dinner) bell?

In 2006 it was revealed that Japanese, Taiwanese, and Thai fishermen had been taking over twice the agreed to quota, for the preceding 20 years….that means that the Japanese delegation to the CCSBT had been sitting in those yearly meetings lying through their smiling teeth. It is conservatively estimated that this was worth $8 billion dollars.

Does anyone think we can believe the Japanese claims of only killing 950 whales in the Southern Antarctic, or the 30,000 dolphins and whales they kill in their own waters? It turns out that Japan sends the same delegates to ICCAT that are seen at the IWC meetings. Countries will usually send two or three representatives to these ICCAT meetings, Japan sends 49.

It has now become apparent that we, as global citizens, need to take the lead in putting an end to the high seas pillaging that has been going on for far too long. It is time for us to use our technology to monitor all fishing vessels, the ports where they land, and the stores and restaurants that sell the fish. The oceans do NOT belong to the fishermen: they belong to all of us, including future generations.

It is not enough to stop eating Bluefin Tuna: we need to vilify anyone who does. We would not tolerate someone sitting down to eat a gorilla steak. We stopped the proliferation of fur farms by showing our outrage at anyone who wore a fur coat, sometimes going so far as to throw “blood” on the perpetrator.

It’s time to start making people feel the heat when they sit down to eat the last of a noble breed of fish. I urge you to find out what restaurants are serving BFT in your area; get to know who the high profile people are that are eating there. Then get on the internet and let the world know who they are. Get them up on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and any other mass circulating sites you can think of.

We are down to the last 3% that existed just 20 years ago. It’s time for a sea change.

References:

(1) Tuna: Love, Death and Mercury. Richard Ellis.
(2) The Unnatural History of the Sea. Callum Roberts.
(3) Song for the Blue Ocean. Carl Safina.
(4) The End of the Line. Charles Clover.

Guest Commentary By Sharon Feinstein

Note from Captain Paul Watson: Back in 2001, the Sea Shepherd ship Ocean Warrior docked in Tobago where our crew spent the summer patrolling the beaches to protect Leatherback turtles from poachers. Protecting turtles in Tobago is as easy as being a tourist. Anyone can spend a couple of weeks walking the beaches there to discourage the poachers. I can’t think of a more pleasant form of activism combining one’s vacation with doing something really worthwhile. Sand, sun, surf, and service to the oceans and a Caribbean holiday to boot. Please contact Sharon Feinstein for information on how you can be of service to the endangered Leatherback turtle.

540 kilo leatherback turtles swim thousands of miles back to the beaches where they were born in Tobago, only to be brutally slaughtered. Their flippers are chopped off with machetes for the meager amount of wild meat they provide. Alone and trembling, these magnificent, vulnerable creatures are left in agony to bleed to death.

The more efficient slayers wait amongst the trees, lift the turtles into boats, and slaughter them in secret before dumping the carcasses at sea.

Each turtle lays 80 to 120 eggs around five times a season, but blinding lights around the beaches are another death trap for these endangered animals. The tiny hatchlings – instead of following the moon to the sea - are confused by the beams of artificial light and end up dead in gutters, drains or against hotel walls. As well, fishermen lay out their nets on the sand instead of reeling them up, and hatchlings are caught up in the ropes and suffocate to death.

This is the tragic plight of an endangered species, in serious decline and hurtling towards extinction. Leatherback turtles are protected by various international treaties and agreements as well as national law, but poachers roam free on certain beaches in Tobago, and openly defy these laws.

I am working with a vet and scientist in England and local environmentalists in Tobago to educate youth groups, raise awareness, patrol the beaches, and pressure airlines and government officials to stop this terrible practice.

Please go to my website and see what you can do to help.

###

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

The Yakuza controlled Japanese whaling fleet left Japan yesterday and have officially begun their 6,000 mile voyage to the remote waters of the Australian Antarctic Territory. Their intention is to slaughter 925 protected Antarctic Minke whales and 50 endangered Fin whales inside the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in violation of the global moratorium on commercial whaling and in violation of the Antarctic Treaty.

These people are poachers. They are criminals and they are engaged in the remorselessly cruel slaughter of the largest, most intelligent and most socially complex sentient beings in the oceans.

The Japanese fleet of eight ships will head south down the Eastern Pacific coastline of Asia past the West coast of Australia to the edge of the Antarctic ice fields, and there they will unleash the horror of their harpoon cannons with the intent to extinguish the lives of nearly a thousand whales. They are doing this under the ridiculously bogus excuse that the killing is being conducted for “scientific research.”

Whaling is “tradition” in Japan that began at the same time that torture for scientific research became a tradition. They began doing lethal so-called scientific research on human beings just before and during World War II and in 1946 with the help of General Douglas MacArthur they set up their Antarctic whaling fleets to begin their pogrom of cetacide in the Southern Oceans.

Our job is to stop the killers and to save the lives of as many whales as possible and the Sea Shepherd ships Steve Irwin and the newly secured Ady Gil are in position to depart from Fremantle, Western Australia on December 7th. The Japanese fleet and the Sea Shepherd fleet should arrive off the coast of Antarctica at around the same time.

Sea Shepherd will once again be taking a film crew to the Southern Oceans, this time to film the 3rd season of Animal Planet’s hit show Whale Wars.

Hopefully, it will be the last season for the show. Our objective is to sink the Japanese whaling fleet economically and I believe that this is the year that we have the best chance of doing so. We have the only hit TV show on the air where the stars want the show to end because the end of Japanese whaling will bring an end to Whale Wars.

The last three Sea Shepherd Antarctic Whale Defense campaigns, Operation Leviathan (2006-2007), Operation Migaloo (2007-2008) and Operation Musashi (2008-2009), were successful in cutting whale kill quotas in half and negating the profits of the whaling fleet. The whalers are now deeply in financial debt and the newly elected government of Prime Minister Jun Hoshikawa has indicated they are fed up with the massive subsidies the government is paying to support an industry that is losing money and is giving the nation of Japan a very negative image worldwide.

The Sea Shepherd’s long-term objective is to sink the Japanese whaling fleet economically. We are very close to bankrupting the fleet and I am confident that we will hurt their profits significantly this year to the point we may be able to force the shutting down of the fleet.

It also gives the Hoshikawa government an honorable way to retreat from their whaling activities in the Southern Ocean. Discontinuing the subsidies for an industry that consistently fails to make a profit is simply good business. The spending review committee established by Japan's new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has recommended that funding for the Overseas Fishery Cooperation Foundation be cancelled after 2010. The OFCF is the largest financer of the Tokyo-based Institute of Cetacean Research.

If the government loans for whaling are revoked, it is unlikely the Institute of Cetacean Research can continue to operate. Reports in the Japanese media claim that the Institute has failed to fully repay more than one billion yen in previous OFCF loans. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is the reason these loans have not been repaid. Our interventions have been successful in negating their profits for the last three fiscal years.

In addition, the committee will be reviewing the spending by the Department of Foreign Affairs and their expenditures of bribes to third world countries in exchange for their pro-whaling votes at the International Whaling Commission meetings.

There is a good possibility that many of these third world Japanese puppet governments will not have the money to make an appearance at the 2010 meeting of the IWC scheduled for next June in Morocco.

United States President Barack Obama will be visiting Japan this week and the whaling issue is on the agenda for his meeting with the Prime Minister.

The position of the United States is one of opposition to commercial whaling and lethal scientific research whaling, as expressed in a statement by the U.S. State Department, which says, "The United States is committed to advancing the global conservation and management of large whale populations through science-based policies and leadership in the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

"The United States continues to view the commercial whaling moratorium as a necessary conservation measure and believes that lethal scientific whaling is unnecessary in modern whale conservation management," the State Department says.

Meanwhile, 40 environmental nongovernmental organizations that work in Latin America have requested that their governments take diplomatic actions against the killing of whales "under supposed scientific purposes" to save the lives of hundreds of whales in the Southern Hemisphere.

Adding weight to our efforts is a petition presented earlier this week to Japan and signed by all the Latin American commissioners of the International Whaling Commission.

Elsa Cabrera, executive director of the Cetacean Conservation Center of Chile, said, "The vast support of the Latin-American NGOs is a strong message to our governments about the need to publicly reject the so-called 'scientific whaling' operations, an activity that is not regulated and that it is conducted without any mechanisms of control in waters that paradoxically are a whale sanctuary."

In the letter the NGOs affirmed, "Since the implementation of the moratorium on commercial whaling, the government of Japan has captured more than 8,000 whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

Roxana Schteinbarg, executive coordinator of the Whale Conservation Institute of Argentina declared, "We are confident that our governments will pay attention to our concerns and begin actions that can stop the Japanese whaling fleet."

The Sea Shepherd ships will be heading into a confrontation with the Japanese whaling fleet with the eyes of the world upon us. We have a difficult challenge. The Japanese whalers will try to kill us and if they do injure or kill any of my crew or myself the government of Japan will justify and defend their crimes.

We on the other hand must intervene to halt their whaling without injuring any of the Japanese whalers knowing that no matter how non-violent our efforts, our governments will not support us if we get into trouble and will condemn our actions no matter how careful we are in our tactics.

The Greenpeace Foundation has already condemned Sea Shepherd efforts and continues to raise funds to save the whales despite the fact that they have not returned to the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in the last two years and they have no plans to return this year. Once again the Sea Shepherd ships will take on the whalers without any support from any other non-governmental organization or government.

It has been a prolonged campaign and this is the 6th voyage that Sea Shepherd has mounted to intervene against the Japanese whale poachers. Our strategy all along has been to sink the Japanese whaling fleet economically – to bankrupt them.

I am confident that we will achieve this objective and I am hopeful that this will be the last voyage that we will need to undertake to defend the whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.