Illegal Whale Meat Still on Japanese Menus

The Japanese continue to trample on the international moratorium on whaling. They have the blood of hundreds of dead minke whales on their hands to prove it

Though Japan officially ended commercial whaling in 1986 when it agreed to an international moratorium. However, it has used a loophole in the law allowing for the killing of whales for "scientific research," holding onto the activity as an important aspect of their culture. The whale meat doesn't seem to make its way to scientific research organizations -- it has been reported to appear in Japanese groceries and restaurants.

Yesterday, a Reuters story reported that Japan killed 679 minke whales, a number that is much less than their goal due to the efforts of anti-whaling activists like Sea Shepherd, which interceded and prevented the killing of 305 whales by their own account. "We continue to speak the one language these whale pirates understand," said Sea Shepherd founder Captain Paul Watson said in an official statement. "Profit and loss: we need to keep their losses up and their profits down. We will eventually beat these killers with aggressively applied economics."

In the northeast Atlantic, there are an estimated 103,000 minke whales, a type of baleen whale which can live for up to 60 years and first appeared during the Oligocene epoch about 34 million years ago. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) lists the minke whale as a threatened species.

GET INVOLVED

• Sign the Whale's Revenge petition urging the International Whaling Commission to close the loophole that allows whaling in the name of so-called "scientific research" (1,097,771 signatures have been collected so far)
• Volunteer with Sea Shepherd
  

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image: Bawolff