SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Japanese whalers on Tuesday celebrated what they described as a court victory in the US to end years of high seas clashes with anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, which immediately vowed to fight on.
The arch enemies have waged a legal and public relations battle as Sea Shepherd has sought to disrupt an annual whale hunt in the Antarctic that Japan defends as scientific research.
However, the settlement between the US-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Japan's whaling body is unlikely to end the dispute as operations in Antarctic waters are mostly carried out by Sea Shepherd Australia, which does not come under the ruling.
[...] Sea Shepherd played down any suggestion of a global agreement, saying the settlement only applied to its US arm and that other branches, including its Australian office, would keep fighting.
"The ruling in the US courts affects ONLY our US entity," the group's global chief executive Alex Cornelissen said in a statement.
[...] Japan claims it conducts vital scientific research using a loophole in an international whaling ban, but makes no secret that the mammals ultimately end up on dinner plates.
It was forced to call off the 2014-2015 hunt after the United Nations' top court, the International Court of Justice, ruled in 2014 that its annual mission to the Antarctic was a commercial hunt masquerading as science.
The hunt resumed at the end of 2015, with the fleet returning to Japan in March of this year after having killed more than 300 of the mammals.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday August 24 2016, @03:13AM
If you want to stop a business, you only have to make their efforts unprofitable. While tying them up in court is a good start, if they really want to win, they need to make the companies really start hemorrhaging money via sabotage.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by In hydraulis on Wednesday August 24 2016, @03:25AM
Better yet, erase the market for whale meat.
From what I've heard, this is going to happen naturally in around twenty to thirty years. Taken as a whole, younger Japanese people simply don't want to eat it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @08:51PM
What you need is some "scientific" evidence that eating whale meat makes your dick shrink. Or that it benefits the Chinese.
Problem solved. :)
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheLink on Wednesday August 24 2016, @03:41AM
It's already unprofitable so it's not much of a business is it? Their insistence on continuing whaling has little to do with business, profit nor feeding the Japanese stomachs. Thus your proposal is unlikely to work.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/japans-whaling-industry-losing-tons-of-money [vice.com]
http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/resource-centre/economics-japanese-whaling [ifaw.org]
Ironically it was the USA that got a generation of Japanese to eat whale meat:
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/japanese-barely-eat-whale-whaling-big-deal/ [wired.com]
The leaders involved probably view it as one of those "national pride"/self-pride things. Figure a face-saving/gaining way for them to stop or reduce whaling to genuinely scientific numbers and that might work better.
But as the Wired article says, there really isn't a clear cut justification for the Japanese to stop whaling - since eating pigs is legal and there are far other endangered species (like bluefin tuna) that are more endangered and still legal to catch and kill. And Minke whales aren't even cuddly ;). The Japanese have already reduced hunting of whales to levels which are unlikely to drive them to extinction (there are 800,000 minke whales and the Japanese catch 300+/year).
(Score: 4, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday August 24 2016, @10:35AM
And Minke whales aren't even cuddly
Says someone who has clearly never tried.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @05:42AM
Sadly, the anti-whalers seem to be fairly incompetent at this task. They need to hire some folks with a few more balls than they have to deal with this.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 24 2016, @03:19PM
If they somehow procured heavy weapons and started using them against the whalers, that would probably result in them being apprehended and/or attacked by some national navy (probably Australia's, since this stuff seems to mostly be happening near there). It would probably also result in criminal prosecutions: the guys on the SS ships still have normal homes and families to go back to usually. We're not talking about Captain Nemo here, unfortunately: it'd be pretty cool to see some crazy rich guy with a submarine shooting torpedoes at the whalers.