11/13/2009 – If you thought we saved the whales in the 1980s, think again. Although supposedly rescued by a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, they’re still struck by ships, caught in discarded nets, poisoned by pollution and harassed by the booming noise of underwater oil and gas exploration.
Beyond that, however, thousands upon thousands of whales have been studied to death — quite literally — by a branch of the long-entrenched Japanese bureaucracy.
The new prime minister of Japan, however, has promised to change many practices of the last 50 years of rule by his political opposition. So perhaps when Yukio Hatoyama meets President Barack Obama on Nov. 12-13, they can also discuss how best to finally end this thinly justified enterprise.
Each year, Japan sends a fleet of ships, including a huge processing factory, to the waters around Antarctica, an area declared a whale sanctuary by the international community in 1994. These vessels hunt and kill almost a thousand whales annually, with the entire operation paid for by Japanese taxpayers through the benign-sounding Fisheries Agency of Japan.