A good friend of mine wrote this blog....

THERE ARE NO GOOD REASONS TO KILL WHALES. EVER. ANYWHERE. IN FACT, I'D GO SO FAR AS TO SAY THERE ARE NO GOOD REASONS TO KILL ANY CREATURE AT THE TOP OF THE FOOD WEB.

We don't need to kill them for food. We have plenty of other things to eat. Eating them is a fucking stupid idea anyway. Mercury, Cadmium, Lead, DDT... mmm everyone's favourite poisons.

We don't need to kill them for 'science'. Living specimens are much more fun and more informative for study. New methods developed by NZ and Aus mean that there is NO DATA that we get by killing them that we cannot gather without harming these animals.

We don't need to kill them for the arms race. You know who it is who buys all the whale product outside Japan? Arms companies like Lockheed Martin. They use whale blubber to lubricate their nuclear warheads and missile silo's. This world needs a reduction in these types of weapons, not their proliferation! In the words of Dave Lange at the Oxford Union debate: "Nuclear weapons are morally indefensible"

We need to keep them alive for science. We spend billions of dollars sending probes and signals and data out into space looking for intelligent life with which we might communicate. It is somewhat ironic then, that our planet is covered with intelligent, communicable species with which we make no attempt whatsoever to communicate. Instead we brutalise and mutilate them. Scientific purposes would be served much more richly by attempting to talk to whales rather than harpooning them.

We need to keep them alive so we can monitor what happens in the ocean. Top-of-the-food-web species are crucial bio-indicators. Their presence is an indicator of a healthy eco-system, while their absence could indicate a serious pollution or other environmental problem (eg a chronically overfished ocean...). In my view, becasue of this, whether they're endangered or not is irrelevant. We shouldn't kill them anyway.

Whaling is a fucking stupendous waste of life and money. The Japanese don't do it for the value of the meat, or because it wants to give it's people mercury poisoning. They do it because it pisses us off. And then we get all in a tangle trying to stop them. They enjoy this because it is their great diversion. They think if we're too busy trying to stop whaling that we won't notice their fishing industry raping and pillaging the rest of the ocean! They're terrified that we might actually induce them to limit their fishing, or, God forbid, document their catches and enforce quotas. $$$ is poured into whaling from other sectors of the Japanese fishing industry as a tactic to eternally delay the modernisation and regulation of Japanese fishing.

I agree with him...