Sea Shepherd headed to Australia to refuel

Sea Shepherd is headed to Australia to refuel.

Japan Whaling Association President, Keiichi Nakajima, has asked that New Zealand and Australia not allow Sea Shepherd into its ports, even though Japanese ships themselves are banned from coming to port in Australia because of their illegal whaling.

Peter Garrett, Minister for Environment in Australia says they will let Sea Shepherd come to port, unless their are valid legal issues brought forward. "We have always said that any request of that kind would be considered in the light of our international and national legal requirements in terms of port issues,'' Mr Garrett said.



Editorial from the The Dominion Post, New Zealand
07 January 2009

Clear signs of desperation

The president of Japan's Whaling Association has done neither his organisation nor his country any favours with his latest outburst, The Dominion Post writes.


According to Keiichi Nakajima, any country that allows Sea Shepherd's anti-whaling protest ship, the Steve Irwin, to refuel at one of its ports will be considered to be in league with the anti-whalers. What is more, says Mr Nakajima, whose country is putting diplomatic pressure on Australia and New Zealand to deny the Steve Irwin port entry, any country that ignores his warning will be "complicit in any further attacks".

The whaling industry is clearly becoming desperate. It is as absurd to argue that allowing a ship to refuel at a New Zealand port makes New Zealand responsible for what its crew does as it would be to argue that a country that admitted a Japanese whaler to its ports was guilty of illegal whaling. Or for that matter, as absurd as it is to argue that harpooning up to 1000 whales a year advances the cause of science.

The only cause that is advanced by Japanese whalers is the cause of the Japanese whaling industry and even that appears to be tenuous. The stockpiles of whalemeat in Japanese warehouses suggest the majority of Japanese consumers find the idea of eating whales as distasteful as the majority of non-Japanese consumers.

The activities of the Sea Shepherd-Animal Planet crew are undoubtedly vexatious for Japan's whalers. They pursue the Japanese whaling fleet across the Southern Ocean, they throw bottles of foul-smelling butryic acid rotten butter and a slimy gel aboard any whalers they get close to, and the Sea Shepherd's captain, Paul Watson, denounces whalers in terms that question their masculinity.

"They strut around with their lethal lances and pose in front of their big harpoon cannons ... but when we show up to defend the whales, they run like frightened little schoolgirls," was one of his recent offerings.

But the biggest concern for Japanese whalers must be the presence of an Animal Planet film crew aboard the protest ship, recording footage for its show Whale Wars, which premiered in the United States last November.

The last thing the industry, or Japan, needs is consumers in the US seeing pictures of whales being slaughtered and butchered as they sit down to dinner.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, whaling filled a need in Japan for a cheap source of protein, but that need has long since evaporated a reality acknowledged by Japan's big commercial fishing companies, which have severed their links to an industry that is propped up by grants from the Japanese Government.

That government should bow to the inevitable and call a halt to a practice that is damaging its international reputation. There is money to be made from whales but it is not by eating them. It is by transporting tourists to view one of the marvels of nature. Mr Watson and his Sea Shepherd crewmates are extremists who push protest to the limit of the law and, on occasions, beyond it. But they are also brave and there is a lot of sympathy in this country and Australia for what they are doing.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/dominionpost/4810854a6483.html


Will Peter Garrett Ban the Steve Irwin from Oz?
http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/news-090104-1.html