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[sundubuman]

Activist `pirates' and whalers clash
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Feb 13, 2007 04:30 AM
john Goddard
staff reporter

Protestors dressed as pirates shouted "Arrrrgh!" at a noon-hour demonstration yesterday in support of pirate vessel Farley Mowat, currently clashing with Japanese whaling ships in Antarctic waters.

Nineteen protestors waved signs saying "Pirates love whales" and "Shame on Japan" while standing at a whale sculpture next to a tower housing the Japanese consulate at 77 King St. W.

Transport Canada stripped the Farley Mowat of its Canadian registration last August and the protest vessel has since failed to gain registration from another country. Officially, the boat is a pirate ship, named after the Canadian author of A Whale for the Killing and other books.

On Friday, Farley Mowat crewmembers attacked a Japanese whaling ship with acid, hitting two whalers in the face, shortly after the whalers helped rescue two of Farley Mowat's crewmembers from an iceberg.

"Some temporary eye pain" was a small price to inflict on the whalers, street demonstration leader Bobbi Hunter said. "The real horror that's going on is all the slaughter of these whales."

"Arrrrgh!" shouted fellow protestors in agreement.

The story of the confrontations began Dec. 31 when the Farley Mowat left Australia with sister vessel the Robert Hunter for the Antarctic waters of the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand.

Both vessels belong to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, led by Canadian activist Paul Watson.

Last Friday, protestors in three Zodiac dinghies confronted the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru, Watson told the Associated Press by phone afterward. One Zodiac carrying two protestors lost its way. The Farley Mowat put out a distress call, which Japanese ships answered, including the Nisshin Maru. The whalers helped with a grid search and the two men were rescued. When the whaling and the protest resumed, crewmembers from the Farley Mowat lobbed butyric acid and a smoke bomb onto the deck of the Nisshin Maru.

One crewman was hit by an empty container, the other had acid squirted in his eye, said Takahide Naruko, chief of the Far Seas Fisheries Division of Japan's Fisheries Agency.

Butyric acid is smelly and oily but not permanently damaging, Hunter said.

Japan was scheduled to host a meeting of the International Whaling Commission beginning yesterday, in an attempt to lift the international commercial whaling moratorium. Twenty-six member nations said they would boycott the meeting.

with files from associated press

[Julius]

Good on them. Japan has shut out the outside world debate on whaling for a long time now, the people there just aren't aware of the issues. Rights to continue a national tradition is a redundant argument now, but it still the only line thrown in the Japanese media.

the fact that they are targetting vulnerable and endangered species in a stubborn camapign for meat that is so unpopular they have to make it into petfood and compulsory kiddies lunches. There is no need to eat rare wild animals in this day and age.

[happeningthang]

Sounds like the whalers and protesters called a truce when people's lives were in danger. As the article states, "when the whaling and protest resumed"... it was business as usual.

What, are you suggesting that if a whaler fell overboard, the protesters wouldn't help him? Of course they would, and once he was returned to his vessel, it's a fair assumption he'd go back to work.

[sundubuman]

piracy is piracy.

those attacking the Japanese ship should be prosecuted.

[happeningthang]

[Ya-ta Boy]