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With Sales Down, Whale Meat Flogged As Source of Strength
beaverdownunder writes "From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: 'Japan's peak whaling body has launched a new campaign to promote whale meat as a nutritious food that enhances physical strength and reduces fatigue. With about 5,000 tonnes of whale meat sitting unwanted in freezers around Japan, the country's Institute for Cetacean Research has decided to launch a new campaign to promote the by-product of its so-called scientific whaling program. Once popular in school lunches, younger generations of Japanese rarely, if ever, eat whale."
And maybe the Australians should start sinking whaling ships that breach Australia's exclusive economic zone or territorial waters to hunt whales illegally against international and local laws.... not that I care about the bloody whales, only that they think they should be exempt from international law.
They claim they want to prove that whales are numerous enough to again allow for commercial whaling, and that such proof would be impossible to gather without research. Assuming you see whales as just another resource, like fish, this is a reasonable stance to take.
The underlying issue is that many countries want a total moratorium on whaling for cultural reasons. Japan and several other countries with long culture of whaling view this as insanity and see whales as the same as any other nautical resource. In a way they are right, many of modern fish stocks are in much worse condition then many of the whale stocks, but because many of the countries that want total moratorium have severe vested interests in fishing but no whaling, they deflect attention from painful decisions that need to be taken in regards to fishery policy by focusing attention on whaling which is essentially free for them - as they do not have a whaling fleet or culture of whaling.
What part of "sitting unwanted in freezers" and "killing whales" is part of your moronic idea of popluation study? Oh! The Bald Eagle is Endangered.... Guess What's For Dinner! Get bent you idiot.
Just an FYI: not all whale species are endangered. You can see some examples here (prepare to give your L type cones a function test):
Humpback whale, Minke whale, Southern Right whale.
As you can see, those species are listed as "Least Concern" by the IUCN, which happens to be the same category that the sewer rat receives. There have been allegations that endangered whales have been killed by the Japanese whaling industry, which is obviously reprehensible.
BTW, there have also been allegations that the "Least Concern" bald eagle (oh, also FYI: it's no longer endangered) have been killed by the Amish chicken farming industry.
I don't really have an opinion on the ethics of whaling "least concern" whale species. I consider that concept similar to the beef industry. Why is killing and eating cow acceptable if killing and eating non-threatened whale species is not? Of course, you will notice that the ethical consideration is orthogonal to the legality consideration.
I am vegetarian, so I am not faced with cognitive dissonance about the situation, but I don't care which animals that other people eat if it isn't actively promoting extinction of a species.