USA (4 August 2006) -- Confrontational anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd is preparing to bring a bigger, faster and more powerful boat to Australia next month ahead of the next Japanese whale hunting season in the Southern Ocean. The new ship is called Leviathan and is being refitted in the Caribbean. It will depart for Australia late next month. Founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and the ship's captain, Paul Watson said the Leviathan was a long-range vessel that would enable him to intercept the Japanese fleet. "We will be bringing two ships, a helicopter and about 60 volunteers to the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary. Quite a few of the crew will be Australian," he said. "We get called lots of things but the bottom line is that Sea Shepherd is not a protest organisation. "We intervene against illegal activities in accordance with the United Nations World Charter for Nature that allows for non-government organisations and individual intervention to uphold international conservation law." Sea Shepherd was criticised this year by both the Japanese and Australian governments for its vigorous methods, but conservationists hail the group as a vital pro-active organisation in the fight against Japan's so-called scientific whaling. Scientists said yesterday that a revolutionary process for determining a whale's age could be ready within six months, eliminating the last excuse Japan has for killing hundreds of whales a year. Japan claims it kills whales for scientific research and measures the animal's age by extracting a substance similar to ear wax from the dead whale. Under the new method, pioneered by the whale research centre at Southern Cross University in NSW, a sliver of skin from a whale is used to analyse the DNA of the whale and determine its age. | | "The West is trying to impose its unilateral standards on us. I regard this as cultural imperialism," said Masayuki Komatsu whose strident ultranationalist rhetoric echoes the anti-western slogans of Japanese fascists convicted of war crimes and executed after World War II. Komatsu describes whales as the "cockroaches of the sea" and argues that "whales must be killed to protect fish." But he declines comment on why fish and whales thrived for millions of years before commercial whaling and fishing industries severely depleted edible fish stocks and nearly wiped out whale species around the world. Most modern, educated Japanese do not eat whale and reject government propaganda that whaling is synonymous with being Japanese. (graphic by Aki Ueno, caption by Hiroyuki Watanabe) Associate Professor Peter Harrison said whale research boats could pick up dead skin shed by whales when they breached the surface and analyse part of the chromosome to determine age to an accuracy of between five and 10 years. The Japanese argument that nearly a thousand whales had to die each year for proper scientific research was nonsense, he said. SOURCE - WA NewsSCUBA FORUMDISCUSS THIS TOPIC - Dive in and have your say at Scuba Forum |
