Paul Watson is the founder and president of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He recently wrote an article published on The Guardian website:
I don’t think that there is a more isolated, more remote, or more forbidding place on this planet than where we find ourselves at this moment (…) It is summertime in Antarctica and outside on the deck, the wind is blowing at 30 knots and the temperature has dropped to -10C.
On our port beam at a quarter of a kilometre, and just barely discernible through the misty swirling snow is the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker. I can see her taking white water over her bow and hoar frost clinging like bleached algae on her blue, grey, and black mottled hull.
Ahead of us another quarter of a kilometre, a massive black hull plunges and bucks in a frothing sea. And as if the sea spray was not enough, the ship fires six high-powered streams of sea water in different directions. Briny icicles hang from her rails.
I can see the stern slipway, that awful maw that literally swallows whales whole, wasting nothing, they say, except for the whales themselves. The beautiful creatures get dragged onto the flensing deck to be mutilated and cut into pieces, to be frozen and boxed below deck as streams of steaming blood pour into the sea from the scuppers.
It’s hard to imagine what Paul Watson describes, although footage and pictures show whales, dolphins washed ashore shot, stabbed, mutilated. Watson adds:
In the sea and flying through the air are the great living treasures of these waters – the birds, whales, seals, and penguins; and beneath the surface the great schools of fishes and the vast plumes of plankton and krill.
What brings us down here year after year is the simple fact that these waters have been designated by the international community of nations as the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary, and we are here to defend the integrity and the sanctity of this legal sanctuary for whales.
The Japanese whalers are slaughtering protected, threatened, and endangered species of whales within this sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on commercial whaling. They are also in contempt of an Australian federal court ruling from 2008 that specifically forbade them from killing whales in the waters of the Australian Antarctic territory.
The real question is: why do ‘we’ still need to kill whales, or dolphins?!
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