To Kill The Whale

It has been interesting, but at the same time shocking and eye-opening, to read Greenpeace's Ocean Defenders' blog. Among those who publish there are a tight-knit band of people who are not only providing moral, financial and intellectual support to the global anti-whaling movement -- as many everyday citizens of various countries do very willingly -- but are involved on the very front lines, confronting the Japanese whale-slaughtering armada head-on in the interests of saving the lives of some of the Earth's most intelligent, beautiful and vulnerable creatures. Their accounts tell the brutal reality of the sorts of crimes against nature that Japan's modern "scientific whaling" programme entails.

The concept that supposedly rational human beings are doing away with these beautiful creatures is hard enough to stomach. The fact that they're doing it inside the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, the one area in the world where whales are supposed to be able to find true safety from the likes of commercial interests, adds to one's disgust. But the manner in which they are killed is the cyanide icing on the profit-driven cake. People not directly involved in the events are often not aware of exactly how the whales are slaughtered. The Ocean Defenders blog provides a much-needed wake-up call by presenting unadulterated accounts of the deaths of whales and the aggression of the crew of the Japanese expedition.

Gone are the days when the only thing used to kill a whale was a simple harpoon, often driven by hand into the whale's flesh -- as if that wasn't bad enough. Modern technology has allowed increasingly violent, but seemingly not much more effective, methods of murder to be produced and utilised. The harpoons are now launched out of a cannon, weighing forty-five kilograms and tipped with a grenade. Upon impact -- more often than not with a whale -- the grenade explodes, yielding horrific effects. A whale will frequently survive this first part of the ordeal, only to find itself in no-doubt unbearable amounts of pain, already mortally wounded and with a harpoon embedded in its flesh. It is then reeled in towards the ship, via the cable attached to the harpoon, as it writhes in agony and is shot with guns by the crew onboard the vessel. Death is not a quick process. Greenpeace activists often find themselves having to put whales out of their misery. In the past I have even seen footage where a whale is electrocuted until it dies just over twelve minutes after having been initially hit with the harpoon. I am not aware that that technique has been used most recently, but the prior method of murder that I described is how the total of more than nine-hundred whales taken so far this "season" have died.

The whalers are now even showing a disregard for human life, with the highly-publicised firing of a harpoon directly over the top of a Greenpeace protest speedboat on 14 January having raised tensions markedly. The activists had positioned themselves in between the bow of a whaling vessel and its otherwise helpless prey in an attempt to protect the creature, but the harpoon operator launched his weapon at the whale regardless of the fact that there were human beings that could have been caught in its path. When the cable, caught on the console of the much smaller boat, went taut, it threw one activist into the water. This incident follows the aggressive actions of the ship's harpoon operator that morning, when he allegedly took aim at the protest speedboats with the loaded rifle used to shoot at whales. Although the activists are understandably upset by all of this carry on, the harpoon operators' actions may yet prove to be of tactical benefit to their cause -- the whalers now appear to be making no secret of their own inhumanity, and the scrutinising eyes of the world are set firmly on their behaviour.