Sea Shepherd contends that the ship put out a distress signal that the Japanese ignored. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but with the struck ship still afloat, no one in the water, and the Bob Barker nearby ready to render aid (as you noted), the failure of the Japanese to help doesn’t seem particularly offensive.
Regarding legal aspects, the Ady Gil had a NZ registry (something I was a little surprised to hear) so they will apparently be investigating the incident. Australia will do so as well, but the analysis I’ve read suggests that they’ll likely tread lightly as most of the world doesn’t recognize their Antarctica claims.
I’d imagine the purpose isn’t necessarily to stop that particular whaling ship, but to cause sufficient damage to raise the insurance premiums for all commercial whalers, such as to make it not viable. That’s got to be much easier than changing the public opinion in a country.
But all they’re doing is decreasing the supply and raising the prices, making it more profitable for the whalers who are successful. It’s the same mistake made by drug wars targeting suppliers instead of users.
Reading up on the Sea Shepherd group it looks like they were originally founders (or early members) of Greenpeace. Greenpeace formed from the Sierra Club (green) and Quakers (peace). As I understand the story Greenpeace, going with the “peace” part, chose to bear witness to raise public awareness and achieve change that way.
Apparently some in the group felt this was not working as countries like Japan seemed content to continue in the face of public opinion. Some in Greenpeace left and formed the Sea Shepherd group in order to take more direct action (up to putting a limpet mine on a whaling ship in harbor and sinking it as well scuttling one of their own ships which a court gave to whalers for damage the Sea Shepherd group caused).
The rift between the two seems wide these days. Greenpeace used to maintain a website that tracked the locations of whalers. The Sea Shepherd group would use that to do their thing. Greenpeace took the website down so as to deny Sea Shepherd this info.
Can the Japanese navy project power anywhere in the world’s oceans or are they restricted by treaty (WWII) to being solely a self-defense force? (I do not know but suspect they are limited.)
Remember this is down by Antarctica in an area claimed by Australia and New Zealand. Although other countries may not recognize that they at the least think of it as their back yard and might not be keen on Japan fielding naval assets to shoot anti-whalers.
Of course at the end of it that is the real problem. No navy is going to blow up another ship for throwing stink bombs or being annoying in international waters. Talk about an international mess. Japan may be content to let their whaling industry to continue but I doubt they feel they need it so badly as to ramp up tensions in such a fashion.
Fraknly, the Seasheps should be sent to prison. They’re harassing people who, like it or not, are doing little more than harvesting minke as far as I’ve heard. Minke are basically the rats of the ocean: dim, numerous, and not particularly interesting. People have gotten this weird idea that whales are special and magical animals. I might agree that the rarer larger whales are special. Maybe. Not minke.
They have a largish fleet that is quite modern, with Aegis antiaircraft and combat-system capability in their latest classes of destroyers. In recent years the scope of their mission has broadened - for example they participated in anti-piracy operations near Somalia recently.
Seems abundantly clear if the Japanese ship had not changed course they would not have hit. The Ady Gil, if moving at all, barely seemed to have enough speed for steering. While it does seem the Ady Gil might have been accelerating in the last moments before collision I am hard pressed to think the captain did that to ram the other ship. Presumably he was trying to gain speed to avoid the collision.
Found the following:
Take the above as a FWIW. I know this is the word of the Sea Shepherd crew who we can hardly call unbiased. Big grain of salt on that one. More of a data point.
I know they are quite capable with a blue water navy. Just not sure what, by treaty, they are allowed to do outside their territorial waters. IIRC they take pains to point out their non-combat role when helping away from their territory. May have changed though…I really do not know. Just the sense I had of it.
Both boats made this collision happen. While I applaud the anti-whaling position, this is a stupid thing to do. And out of curiosity why is the chick on the observing boat laughing? Happy to gather such sensational footage?
Whaling ends when demand stops. That is where the fight is. While it’s a good thing to have brave folks risk their safety to bring back footage of the senseless act of whaling to bring awareness to the people, this sort of action only takes away from the importance of the message. Stop the whaling.
Change the hearts and minds of the Japanese through reason and you will bring an end to this barbaric slaughter.
It’s been my understanding that there already isn’t much of a market for whale meat in Japan; the industry is government supported as an anti-unemployment measure and out of tradition.
People have been trying this for decades. The Japanese clearly do not care that much (on the whole, doubtless there are some who care).
Japan demand for ivory was a similar issue. Despite most of the world banning trade in ivory Japanese wanted it and as a result threatened elephants with extinction.
Not sure what else can be done to “raise awareness” to stop this.
Quite possibly. From watching “Whale Wars” on TV, it’s obvious that nothing would make Paul Watson (the founder of Sea Shepherd) happier than for one of his crew to die, on camera, in a way that he could blame on the whalers.
Well, you guys know, the Japanese have a legitimate concern here. After all, it was Whale and Dolphin who dropped the atomic bombs on Japan during WWII… %&@ YOU WHALE! @&% YOU DOLPHIN!!
A pity they only clipped the nose off. A couple casualties would have been the ultimate win-win. The turd Watson gets his much wanted martyr status (at the expense of some poor NPC hippie, of course. Not his own life) and the whalers would see an end to the endless stream of hippie volunteers to harass them. Great TV too. As it is, it is just one more incident of boo-hoo the evil Japanese broke our toys before we could break them ourselves and hurt ourselves in the process. And they will spend at least 3 episodes building up to it.