Sue, I believe the bottom line of your piece is that Greenpeace would be much more effective in Washington DC or Tokyo than rousting about in the Southern Ocean.

Can we pack them all off to distant lands now?

I thought the bottom line was a bit different, "stop hunting whales because you find them tasty but we like them". The same is basically true for dogs in Korea, cows in India, and so on.

Perhaps a more important issue is over fishing in general. Most shark species (and many other large fish) are endangered in Australia -- yet last week some fishermen and the television were glorifying the catch of one (a bronze whaler ?) which might not have been hanging around had not the fisherman dumped a large piece of tuna (also endangered) in the water to catch it. Other rather obvious examples are places like Victoria market where you can find a fair few species that are endangered, and some that we don't even know the populations of.

THe oceans and its critters are things we should care about -- before spending huge amounts of resources on a politically difficult problem, why not start at home ?

The most effective way for Greenpeace or others interested in stopping whaling would be to follow the example of the buga-up campaigners who helped phase out cigarette advertising.

What they should do is to attempt to make killing whales futile, by rendering the meat of the dead whale unfit for human consumption. They should do this by firing a small harpoon into the dead whale, before it can be loaded onto the Japanese ship. The tip of the harpoon would contain a small amount of arsenic, cadmium, cyanide or other such material which would make Japanese consumers reluctant to eat any part of the meat.

This action may not even be illegal, as it would occur on the high seas, and the dead whale could not be considered to belong to the Japanese until it had been loaded onto their ship. They would certainly not be harming the whale, which would already be dead.

Anti-whaling campaigners never seem to answer what seems to be a key question: Are there enough whales of the type that the Japanese and others are looking to harvest (usually Minke whales) to support a farming program? The Japanese say that they believe that there are tens of thousands of Minke whales and that they could successfully harvest a few hundred of these a year and still maintain a viable population. Is this true? It seems a reasonable question to answer.

Greenpeace and others never seem to clearly answer this question though which makes me suspect that it possibly is true. Simply claiming that whaling of all types should be banned because whales are 'noble creatures' or something similiar really is just emotion over practicality.

Japanese have a different viewpoint to us. We once slaughtered whales almost to extinction, we now see what mighty creatures they are. We see them as wondrous tourist experiences, not something that comes on a plate. Or in a can.
Asians have just about fished their oceans bare now
they are coming into ours where we have rules and regulations and Asians, using the fear of trade, will strip our oceans as well. Knowing that we cannot police our waters, they will ignore our conservation.
If we permit them to use our facilities in any way, that will condone their barbarism.

There is nothing barbarious about killing a whale for food. If that whale is hunted unsustainably it should be treated like overfishing or overhunting of any other species - unsustainable takes.

Calling the Japanese barbarians for engaging in an activity which helped build our nation's wealth, which is a way of life for people in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, and which is nothing unlike taking a fish from the sea is surely unproductive. Why not encourage the Japanese to take whales which are abundant, like Orcas, until other stocks have replenished to a sustainable level, rather than deride them as barbarians? Why don't we call Indonesian fishermen barbarians when they fish illegally in our waters?