Defiant Slaughter at Sea

In 1992, presidential candidate Ross Perot spoke of a giant sucking sound—referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement and how its adoption was going to take away American jobs. Well, the giant sucking sound today is coming from Japan and China, whose governments and people are devouring marine and terrestrial animal life on a monumental scale to serve their consumption habits and self-professed cultural traditions.

© OAR
The once nearly extinct humpback whale
will be targeted in Japan’s hunt.

Japan and China have established themselves as two of the world’s most rapacious wildlife-killing nations. China is abetting the killing of elephants, tigers, bears, turtles and so many other creatures by providing markets for their products and allowing their sale to its billion-plus population. Several tons of turtles are exported every week from Sumatra to China, and that’s just one species from one country. But the Japanese are reminding the world that its own destructive policies are every bit as pernicious, with its latest launching of a flotilla of ships to attack and kill up to 1,000 whales in the southern Pacific and the Antarctic.

The sad fact is, much of the whale meat that its commercial whaling fleet returns to the nation does not even get consumed. Killing humpbacks, fin and minke whales now seems just a point of pride to Japanese fishing leaders, who thumb their nose at the global animal welfare and conservation community and encourage the slaughter of the greatest living beings ever to live on our planet.

These creatures are larger than the dinosaurs that roamed the earth hundreds of millions of years ago, and killing them for these frivolous purposes is a moral crime against nature. Our descendants will judge the Japanese harshly, and we will never forget the failure of leadership in an educated and economically stable nation. It is greed, pride and a lust for killing that animates the nation’s behavior—and there’s nothing good or decent about it. We can only hope that young Japanese, worldly and connected to the happenings across the globe through the entertainment and the telecommunications industries, rebel and assert a more rational and sensible set of policies.