SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Japan will dispatch a whaling fleet to the Antarctic on Tuesday after a one year suspension, the government said, defying international criticism and a UN legal ruling that the "research" expedition is a commercial hunt in disguise.
"The research ships will depart for new whale research in the Antarctic on December 1, 2015," the Fisheries Agency said Monday in a statement on its website.
Tokyo has for years come under intense global pressure to stop hunts that opponents decry as inhumane but that Japan says are an inherent part of its traditional culture.
The United Nations' top legal body judged last year that Japan's so-called scientific whaling activity in the Southern Ocean was a disguise for commercial hunts.
It's for scientific research. Tasty, tasty research.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Tuesday December 01 2015, @07:32AM
If Japan wants to eat whales, they need a big aquarium.
As various posters posted a couple years ago, Japanese don't even particularly want to eat whales. It's nothing special. The problem with whales is that it takes way too long - about ten years - to grow a new whale; but it takes less than an hour to kill one. Perhaps back in the age of Moby Dick it was a fair fight between a few men in a boat and a huge animal. It is not so today.
I personally have no objection to eating wildlife... but only as long as it is done carefully, to not harm the population. Hunters know the basics of the lifecycle of a population. Sometimes it is necessary to kill some to save the rest. Say, an area can feed 100 deer from first snow in October to first grass in April. But there are 200 deer. How many deer will survive? Not even one - they will all die from hunger approximately in February. Killing 100 deer before the winter would have saved the herd. The nature controls the populations in exactly this way - it does not care that so many animals die. Humans can do better.