Yo ateday

be a cannibal today cousy bro. Are you discriminating against indigenous eating habits?

A bit like WHITE British woman chewing their placentas http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-health/11012491/Meet-the-mothers-who-eat-their-placentas.html Yummy!

Land rights for gay whales, bro.

I dislike the idea of whaling and would never eat whale meat, but David has a point. If it is sustainably managed, there is no more rational reason to oppose whaling than to oppose harvesting any other sea creatures.

Even if our strong cultural taboo against eating whale suggests that Australians support a ban on killing and eating whales here, we have no right to impose that taboo on others. I have no more right to tell the Japanese not to eat whale than a Muslim has to tell me not to eat pork.

What right do japanese have to fish in other nation's oceans? Or in oceans, where international conventions have banned all seafood harvest.

Yes some whale species are in recovery mode, even so, with such a small gene pool that recovery has to be very tenuous, and discouraged on many grounds for that and other good animal husbandry reasons!

We had a war with much loss of life, in order to keep these folk out of our back yard.

You'd hear the screams all the way from here to Tokyo, if we decided to fish waters they had some legitimate claim to!

In any event, how much sympathy/support can we extend to them, as China seeks to impose some right of ownership over their marine possessions? What's good for the goose is good for the gander!

Even the most hardened hunter rarely takes out a mother with calf or babe at foot, even when culling feral animals.

If science is the go, then simple tissue samples can be easily collected from breaching animals to tell us all we want to know.

The first being how large is the remaining gene pool and how much more harvesting can be tolerated before the pool, not the actual numbers, becomes too small to sustain a healthy diverse population?

We are all aware of the eventual extremely negative implications of continually putting a father to his own daughters, even by accident rather than deliberate design!
Rhrosty.

I love how it's only the Japanese who are the bad guys.

They should just obtain Norwegian citizenship, grow beards, and change their names to Sven and Olaf. Then they could kill as many whales as they liked and nobody would care.

Rhosty, you ask:

“What right do japanese have to fish in other nation's oceans” The answer is none, but as far as I’m aware they have only killed whales in international waters.

If there are genuine scientific reasons to think that whales cannot be harvested sustainably, whether because of genetic diversity or absolute numbers, then the ban on whaling is rationally defensible. But if the issue is discrimination between species on sentimental grounds, or racist antipathy to the Japanese, then it is not.

I don't care much about whaling either way but what I would suggest is that plastic from our consumption waste posses a far greater risk to whales than the Japs catching a few for food.

As for mercury, this is built up in all fish but I was of the opinion that it only becomes a problem to human consumption with older animals and I thought they targeted young ones. Not sure though.

Save the whale and ignore our homeless kids is what I see.