Enforce the 'bloody law' over whales

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Enforce the 'bloody law' over whales - Sea ShepherdBy MICHAEL FIELD - Fairfax Media | Thursday, 20 December 2007

 

 

 

 

 

 

Australia's sending of a fisheries patrol ship to shadow Japan's whaling fleet near Antarctica has been condemned by a frontline environmental group as a waste of time.

 

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has its ship Steve Irwin - named after the late Australian crocodile media star - off Antarctica waiting to confront the Japanese whalers.

In a statement from the ship Captain Paul Watson says rival environmentalists Greenpeace have monitored the whaling for 20 years and this latest announcement from Canberra was nothing new.

"We need enforcement and we need action on this atrocity," said Captain Paul Watson, "we don't need anymore pictures of dying whales. Greenpeace has been taking pictures for years and it has not stopped the killing of the whales....

"Our response to Australia's announcement of their 'plan' to protect the whales is to drop the camera and pick up your guns and enforce the bloody laws, mate."

Sea Shepherd in previous seasons has been involved in close conflict with the whalers, including an incident of collision at sea between ships.

Yesterday Australia's foreign minister Stephen Smith and environment minister Peter Garrett announced they will send a fisheries patrol ship to shadow Japan's whaling fleet near Antarctica and gather evidence for a possible international court challenge to halt the yearly slaughter.

The icebreaker Oceanic Viking, used for customs and fisheries policing, would leave for the Southern Ocean in days to follow the Japanese fleet.

To avoid a high-seas incident and ease concern in Tokyo, heavy machine guns on the ship and side arms used by boarding crews would be locked in storage below decks, they said.

Japan's whaling fleet plans to hunt 935 minke whales, 50 fin whales and, for the first time in 40 years, 50 humpback whales for research over the Antarctic summer.

Humpbacks were hunted to near extinction until the International Whaling Commission ordered their protection in 1966.

Patrols by a low-flying A319 Airbus jet used by Australian Antarctic scientists would also follow and photograph the Japanese fleet, Foreign Minister Smith said.

"We are dealing here with the slaughter of whales, not scientific research. That's our starting point and our end point," Smith, whose centre-left Labor government won elections last month, partly on a promise of tougher anti-whaling action.

Smith said photographic and video evidence gathered by the ship and aircraft would be used before any international legal tribunals to "make the point that what we are seeing is not scientific research, but the slaughter of whales."

"If you read Australian lips, you'll say that slaughtering whales is not scientific. It's cruel, it's barbaric and it's unnecessary," Garrett added.

A Greenpeace ship left Auckland yesterday to chase the Japanese fleet.