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Sea Shepherd Halts Whaling

Category: Environment

Say what you like about their tactics, but the efforts of Sea Shepherd to harass Japan's whaling fleet in the waters off Antarctica have yielded big results...

sea shepherd

The Japanese fleet returned to port with half as many whales as they set out to catch. The goal was 50 humpback and 50 fin whales, but the fleet caught no humpback whales and one fin whale; of the 935 targeted Minke whales, 506 were killed.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) is a non-profit, marine conservation organization that has been protesting against whaling since the early 80’s, and have been controversial from the offset for their direct action tactics.

Currently sea shepherd vessels are off the coast of Japan disrupting the whaling industry, one of the three countries who continued to hunt whales in defiance of a ban, along with Iceland and Norway. Japan's whaling industry is managed by the Institute of Cetacean Research, who use the whales for research, they then sell the meat on to Japanese markets and restaurants. whales are still being caught by Japanese pirates and sold at a lower price on the black market.

According to Sea Shepherd calculations, their efforts cost Japan's whaling fleet about $132 million, as the average value of each whale is a quarter of a million dollars. The same estimates show that this season the fleet lost money, as 700 whales need to be killed to meet operating expenses.

sea sh halts whaling

The Sea Shepherd organization has hit them long and hard last year and their efforts and risks seem to of paid off. There are now 528 whales swimming freely in the Southern Ocean that would now be dead if not for the fact that they intervened.

All this is not without a cost to the sea shepherd organization, since the start of 2010 the organization has lost the Ady Gil and damaged the Bob Barker in collisions with whaling vessels. In addition, Captain Pete Bethune is now in Japanese custody after boarding a whaler in a harassment operation.