Sea Shepherd's response to LaDuke

[Guest guest]

SEA SHEPHERD RESPONDS TO LaDUKE ON MAKAH WHALING

- " We regret the candidate's ignorance on an issue of international

importance "

 

Sea Shepherd International finds deeply regrettable the position statement

of Green Party Vice Presidential candidate Winona LaDuke on the issue of the

Makah Indian whale hunt. The statement, headed " Winona LaDuke Green Party

Vice Presidential Candidate Position on Makah Whaling: August 2000 " was

widely disseminated today over the internet. In her statement, LaDuke

singled out Sea Shepherd for opprobrium due to its direct action in

opposition to the Makah hunt.

 

" Her statement appears to have been dictated by the venture capitalist whale

hunters of the Makah Tribal Council, " said Sea Shepherd president Paul

Watson. " We provided her with the real history of the hunt scheme since

1992, including the documented involvement of Japanese and Norwegian whaling

interests. The candidate had the facts before her; she chose to discard them

and follow the course of blind ethnic solidarity rather than uncomfortable

truth. We can only call her statement willfully naïve. "

 

Sea Shepherd notes several critical errors of fact in LaDuke's statement,

most critically the implication that the International Whaling Commission

" recognize[d] the nutritional and specific spiritual needs " of the Makah,

when in fact this necessary aspect of any permitted aboriginal whale hunt

under international law was specifically withheld by the IWC. Candidate

LaDuke also fails to grasp the international implications of the Makah's

unrecognized whale hunt in the context of global efforts to conflate

subsistence and commercial whaling, end the global commercial whaling

moratorium, and resume the lucrative worldwide trade in whale meat, always

the clear ultimate goal of the Makah hunt.

 

" In affirming that 'the Vice Presidential Candidate of the Green Party

supports and will enforce the law of the United States.in the protection of

the Makah right to continue their harvest of gray whales,' Ms. LaDuke

appears to be unaware that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently found

the government's Environmental Assessment of the hunt's impacts to be

fatally flawed due to evident bias and ordered them to go back to the

drawing board, " said Watson. " Thus the hunt was illegal when the Makah shot

and killed a whale 'in spite of organized and aggressive interference by the

Sea Shepherd Society,' in the candidate's felicitous phrase. The $5 million

she alleges we forced the government to spend in defense of the hunt went

primarily to the Makah's international lobbying efforts and as payments

rendered to Makah who attended meetings of the tribe's whaling commission. "

 

Sea Shepherd has been fighting against the exploitation of cetaceans and

marine wildlife since 1977. Its volunteer crews have routinely risked their

lives in rousting trawlers from endangered fisheries, halting dolphin

slaughters, confiscating and sinking outlawed driftnets, and enforcing the

global moratorium on commercial whaling - activities that have earned the

group a reputation as the most active of direct-action environmentalists,

and the enmity of the exploiters.

 

Sea Shepherd considers it unfortunate when an ostensible environmental

organization forgets its first obligation to the defense of the natural

world and those creatures that have no voice.

 

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Sea Shepherd International

P.O. Box 2616

Friday Harbor, WA 98250

(360) 370-5500

http://www.seashepherd.org

seashepherd