Holy Cow! That ain’t good at all.
I don’t agree that there’s such a severe gap between understanding human pain and animal pain right now. Its 2016, I cannot believe a significant population can look at a suffering animal and think its the same as a plant. My belief is that they downplay the suffering due to anger at an outside agency telling them what to do
There was an interesting article on the BBC web site last month about Japanese whaling. The Japanese people they talked to seemed to accept that whaling would die out some time in the next 10 or 20 years; the main reasons for the government to keep it alive now are to avoid the stigma of being the party that fired a bunch of employees in the whaling department and to buy a few votes in the districts that get some money from whaling.
You seem to have missed my point. It doesn’t matter whether fish chew their cud, and of course fish doubt have hooves. Under Jewish law, whales are fish, not animals.
As far as I know the general Norwegian view is that the Japanese are uncomfortably lax in harvesting only non-endangered whales. Basically, there is a feeling they go for endangered and non-endangered species equally.
Rather letting the side down, really.
I do wonder if the pressure from the West is making it harder to stop research whaling. They can’t stop without looking like they’re capitulating to other countries.
My point is that they are treif and safe from Jews no matter what.
4,000 (or is it 5,000) years ago, most folks believed them to be fish. 
To be Kosher, a fish must have scales and fins.
2007 wasn’t all that long ago. Ramming a ship isn’t non-violent.
definitely treif!
In some sense “people believed whales to be fish 4000 years ago”. In another sense, there is more than one way to segment the living creatures into “buckets”, and there’s nothing wrong with “those that live in water” vs. “warm blooded with wings” vs. “vermin” vs. “other big stuff that walks around”, which is pretty much how the Bible does it. No, it doesn’t match evolutionary biology, but that doesn’t make it an invalid segmentation of life.
(the biblical segmentation of plants doesn’t match modern classification, either. it matters for which blessing you say before eating the plant, mostly.)
I don’t accept that damaging property is violence . The sea shepherds do not deliberately try to injure people. they try to disrupt the hunt and destroy the commercial value if the catch , by throwing rancid butter at the meat on deck and other tactics. Whatever you Think of their tactics they are effective , some years the Japanese catch no whales because of the sea shepherds . I regularly donate money to them and support their methods .
Let’s say I disagreed with the bill my Governor is going to sign today. So as he is leaving home in the morning, I ram his car with mine. I’m not trying hurt him, I’m just trying to stop him from going to his office. Would you consider this a non-violent protest?
Sea shepherds deny that the ramming was deliberate. Why should you trust the whalers to tell the truth ? Anyway I’m not interested in an argument over the definition of violence. The op asked what could be done to stop Japanese whaling. The sea shepherds are effective , donating to them is probably the best thing you can do to stop whaling. They’ve been going for 30 years and been taken to court many many times but mostly they win, and they’re still doing it. They are also meticulous to video everything from as many angles as possible in case of legal issues .
Why should you trust the “protesters” any more than the whalers?
My impression (based on reading Japanese news) is that they have been “effective” in the same way Al Qaeda terrorists have been. The Japanese public don’t care much about the actual issue, but they do care that their ships are attacked by foreigners. They also care that their practice is attacked by foreigners who (they feel) don’t understand their culture. The Japanese public is not pro-whaling, it’s anti-foreign-meddling. Politicians take advantage and pander to this public sentiment by keeping the whaling program alive, fighting for whaling rights and vilifying anti-whaling organizations (not just Sea Shepherd).
Sea shepherds have never killed anyone in 30 years of operations and they never intend to cause injury to people, slightly different from al Qaeda. Try reading Australian news coverage of the sea shepherds and you’ll get a slightly less biased view of them.
However meticulous they may be - it did not do them any good in the US, where their actions are considered acts of piracy as decided by the 9th district US Court of Appeals:
You may not want to get into it, but the question of whether or not the Shepherds are violent is not irrelevant. It is, among other things, the reason why more moderate environmentalists distance themselves from them.
Never mind their ramming of ships in Antarctic waters - the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been known to strap limpet mines to ships in port. They literally bomb ships.
Japanese whalers are at best playing footsie with international laws and conventions, but that doesn’t somehow legalize strapping explosives to ships, or change the fact that Paul Watson is 12 different kinds of crazy. The way to stop it is not to fund a sociopath who openly suggested that the Tōhoku earthquake was divine retribution.
Again, 30+ years of operations and they’ve never injured anyone. They used an underwater charge to sink a ship in port, its in no way shape or form what you are trying to give the mental image of when you saw “they bomb ships”. No one was even injured in the Sierra incident.
Paul Watson is possibly a sociopath, but he’s the sort of sociopath the world needs and he gets results. Anyway he is no longer the President of Sea Shepherds or a captain of one of the ships, that’s now Pritam Singh and Siddharth Chakravarty respectively.
If by “less biased” you mean “Sea Shepherd is awesome and anyone who doesn’t support them is an awful whale-hater”, of course.
I don’t support Sea Shepherd at all.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
:dubious: