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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: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:07AM
There are however whales and whales. Reading the wikipedia entries on whale hunting, there are charts of what species or populations are endangered and in what areas. In fact, the pro-whaling lobby argues that in some areas, there are simply too many whales compared to the amount of food available (in the case of whales one may perhaps even argue, though I do not know if this is valid, that hunting non-endangered species frees up food resources for the more endangered whales). The quota that for example Norway uses are revised yearly based on estimates of the population sizes and they are not allowed to hunt endangered species, or threatened populations. I still fail to see why it is so different from hunting other animals (assuming that the hunting is done responsibly).