I haven’t tortured flies or bugs for a long time. I think almost every kid goes through a phase like that. Now I’m just creeped out by them and refuse to touch them.
Many members of the infra-order Cetacea indeed display remarkable intelligence. The same can be said for the order primate. But both categories encompass a variety of species. Primates for example include monkeys as well as lemurs.
A few years ago I tried to locate information on the intelligence of Minke Whales and came up empty. I’m guessing that if they had complex language we would know about it.
I have seen no decent evidence that Minke whales deserve special protection.
Nice point DrDeth. If this claim holds up, ISTM that international attention should focus on these sorts of violations, pending better evidence about Minke Whales.
I must admit, my friends and I did the “bug torture” thing for a while, way back when we were kids. By the time we were teenagers, we were past that phase, fortunately.
I never would have contemplated doing anything like that to a fellow vertebrate.
The Sea Shepherds Australia (which are the ones running the Antarctic Whaling Campaigns) have never participated in bombing and the US courts have no jurisdiction over them. Sorry if I really have very little much faith in the decisions of US courts given their obvious pro-corporate bias compared to the rest of the worlds courts. This thread is about the stopping whaling, so only actions undertaken by the Sea Shepherds in their Antarctic whaling campaigns are relevant.
Simply speaking, yes the parent organization did stupid shit in their first 10 years, but they’ve grown up since then.
Interesting question: What court’s jurisdiction gets to decide whether someone operating in international waters is a pirate? If it is the court that has jurisdiction over the alleged piracy victim’s home harbor, it would have to be a Japanese court here. I believe they would agree with the US court’s view.
If the alleged pirate’s home harbor decides, it would be an Australian court, and the Sheperds would not be pirates. (However in that case there also would probably not be any Somalian pirates around the Horn of Africa.)
The Constitution gives the US government the power to decide -
The UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea gives its definition of piracy -
As is common, international law is worth anything only insofar as somebody wants to enforce it.
It is a private ship, committing illegal acts for private ends. No doubt the Sea Shephers would claim they are justified, but :shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan
I never tortured bugs as a kid. The idea never even entered my mind. But since the subject was brought up: I would, to this day, gladly torture mosquitos if I could. Little fuckers deserve everything their getting, and then some.
When the US navy starts patrolling the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary and enforcing their interpretation of the law I’ll believe you, until then “nope”. The Sea Shepherds legal argument is that none of their recent actions meet the definition of violence, so they are not pirates.
The sea shepherds admit to one ramming incident, where they rammed the Sirius, in 1980, and the limpet mine incident also occurred then. As I’ve said I think those were stupid acts that undermined their cause. The organisation has changed since then, they do not deliberately ram ships anymore, they instead try to block operations and sometimes ships accidentally collide. And I have a real hard time seeing tangling a prop or throwing rancid butter on whale meat as “violence”, and apparently so do most of the worlds courts.
I can’t help but feel that’s the nautical equivalent of someone swinging their arms around wildly then claiming they didn’t hit anyone when another person doesn’t move out of the way fast enough.
Pretty sure throwing rancid butter on the meat in an abbatoir or tangling someone’s car tyres would be seen as highly illegal on land so I’m not sure why it’s suddenly OK because it’s happening at sea. In fact, I bet it’s even less OK at sea because, well, seafaring is dangerous at the best of times without ideologically driven people doing dangerous things like deliberately fouling propellers.
Illegal according to who? Which court and do they have jurisdiction? I’ve posted links to legal arguments from the Sea Shepherds earlier in the thread and to an analysis of them. If you want to debate me on this then address those arguments rather than just say “it sure looks like it should be illegal to me”. Thats not much of a legal argument.
The Sea Shepherds ships operate freely from Australian and NZ ports, the Australian government could easily seize them if they wanted to. So what they’re doing is not illegal under Australian law.
Section 467 of the Queensland Criminal Code states:
A person who, with intent to prejudice the safe use of a vehicle or related transport infrastructure or to injure property in a vehicle or related transport infrastructure, does anything that endangers, or is likely to endanger, the safe use of the vehicle or related transport in frastructure commits a crime.
Maximum penalty—life imprisonment.
So there you go, by my reading of that, under Queensland law deliberately fouling the propellers of a ship could potentially get you life in prison.
That’s just one example, which I recalled from my legal studies many years ago.
So how do you explain the fact that the Sea Shepherds crew are not all in prison for life? Possibly because Queensland law does not apply in international waters? Or possibly because the Sea Shepherds are useful to the Australian government? The public overwhelmingly does not want the Japanese to whale in the Antarctic but the Australian government doesn’t want to harm the trade relationship with Japan. So they turn a blind eye to the Sea Shepherds even going so far as to order the RAF to leak information to the Sea Shepherds on occasion. Look at it as a form of proxy warfare but one which is for a good cause and has so far caused zero loss of life.
None of which changes my assertion what they’re doing is illegal and dangerous. I’ve provided a cite to this effect under the laws of an Australian state. Whether or not Queensland law applies in the Southern Ocean is secondary to the fact you asked me to prove it was probably illegal to mess around with ship’s propellers, or a car’s wheels on land. I have done so.
“Yeah, well, they’re not in jail so it must be A-OK” isn’t a rebuttal. People do illegal and/or dangerous things every day and don’t get punished for them. Ever seen people having a cheeky smoke underneath a “No Smoking” sign? They’re not all in jail or getting fined either. Doesn’t make what they’re doing OK or “not illegal”, it just means most people don’t care enough to do anything about it.
Fair enough, but ultimately even if what the Sea Shepherds are doing is illegal (in some court, somewhere) I put it in the same category as black people refusing to sit at the back of bus. The collapse of ocean ecosystems and mass extinction waves resulting in a massive loss of biodiversity is potentially a bigger problem than climate change in the next 100 years, but it gets very little attention. That’s not counting the issue of whether whales should be given greater protection because of their intelligence and complex social structures.
The Sea Shepherds do a lot of other actions to protect biodiversity in the oceans, their anti-whaling campaign is just the most public and controversial. They were and still are prolific in campaigning against illegal drift net fishing, which is immensely destructive and banned by the UN. They are also active against poaching of sea turtles, shark finning, reef destruction and many other issues. You don’t hear about those campaigns in the mass media but they achieve a lot.
http://www.seashepherd.org/bluefin-tuna/
http://www.seashepherd.org/turtles/
I get your point, but you might want to look for a better comparison. To compare the civil rights movement of black Americans to an animal rights movement might be viewed as offensive by some.
Thats two separate issues you are mentioning here. The protection of ocean biodiversity is a good thing, but for all I can find on the matter there seems to be a fairly wide agreement that at least the hunt for Minke whales with the volume currently attempted by the Japanese is not endangering the species. It may be different for other species but the sheperds do not seem to make a distinction here.
They seem to be more motivated by your second argument: The whales’ “intelligence and complex social structures”, but that argument is weak-footed. Whales possess an intelligence that its probably above than that of a kangaroo but still far below that of a human. Now you are defining a level of intelligence that makes a creature out of bounds for the hunt and you are drawing the line somewhere between the whale and the kangaroo. Why is that, and why should the Japanese abide by that line?
I admit that I do not know a lot about the sheperds’ other activities, so I will not comment on them. I do, however, believe that protecting biodiversity in the oceans is a good cause.
I take your point, but to myself and the active members of the Sea Shepherd’s it is not about ‘animal rights’, it’s about preventing the catastrophic collapse of ocean ecosystems, which is a human issue and will effect everyone on the planet.
“Science study predicts collapse of all seafood fisheries by 2050”
“Overfishing Causes Ecosystems To ‘Unravel,’ Fish Populations Can’t Recover After ‘Tipping Points’ Reached”
The Sea Shepherds have a whaling campaign because it gets them publicity and media attention which then helps them raise money for all their other campaigns which get much less media attention. And let me turn your question around, most of the rest of the world has decided that whaling is immoral, why should Japan get to unilaterally decide to continue it? especially in waters on the other side of the planet from them which many other countries have declared to be the “Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary”. BTW, the US was one of the 23 countries that agreed to the creation of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in 1994, Japan was the only country that objected.
Fair enough: If you could demonstrate that there was a broad consensus among mankind that whales should not be killed, you might have a point. As it stands, your claim that “most of the rest of the world has decided that whaling is immoral” is a little bold. What do you base that on? 23 nations voted to create a sanctuary, is that it? Well, the UN currently recognizes some 195 nations, most of which are not even members to the body where that vote was taken. And where did the 23 in favor say that whaling is “immoral”?
While following your link, I found an interesting piece of information about how Japanese was brought to agree to the moratorium that now forces it to engage in that “scientific whaling” charade:
Is that how the “agreements” in the IWC come about?
You mean politics? Yeah thats generally how you get a country to do something they don’t want to do, use a carrot and stick. Look I’m not even opposed to all whaling on principle. If the Japanese really want to catch Minke whales, go and do it in their own coastal waters. Minke whales are found all over the world, not sure why they can’t do it in their own backyard, rather than in an environmentally sensitive area that the other 23 countries in the IWC want to be a sanctuary.