Whale Wars – Viva!life 91

… a global battle between compassion and hypocrisy

Featured in Viva!Life 91/Spring 2025

One of the bravest actions I have ever seen in defence of animals took place in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica in what was supposed to be
a globally agreed whale sanctuary.

A large Japanese whaling ship was ploughing through a rolling swell. About 100 metres away, another large vessel – a supply ship – kept pace with it, preparing to transfer fresh supplies. They were being filmed from the deck of a Sea Shepherd vessel.

Heading straight towards the Japanese vessels was a tiny RIB (rigid inflatable boat) with a handful of people on board, aiming directly for the gap between them. The Japanese ships immediately altered course and began to move closer together – a hugely dangerous tactic – with
what seemed to be the intention of squashing the RIB between them while from their decks, water cannons deluged the RIB crew with powerful jets of water.

The turmoil taking place on a threshing sea was terrifying and was made even more poignant by the fact that I knew one of the people in the RIB – Lex Rigby, until recently Viva!’s head of investigations, who served aboard Sea Shepherd vessels for seven years.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was formed by Captain Paul Watson, probably one of the most identifiable men on Earth, with his flowing, snow white hair and beard, whose avowed intention was to interrupt, harry, damage and distract Japan’s whale-killing fleet as much as possible in order to save lives and focus the world’s attention on their despicable slaughter.

The 50 million square kilometre sanctuary was declared in 1994 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), with Japan voting against it. Japan then emblazoned its whale-hunting vessels with the word
RESEARCH in huge letters and continued whaling for ‘scientific purposes’, exploiting a loophole in the IWC agreement. It didn’t fool the UN Court of Justice and in 2014 it declared Japan’s Antarctic whaling programme illegal – but Japan continued anyway. In 2018 to 2019 they killed 333 minke whales, 181 of whom were female and 122 of these were pregnant, as well as a smaller number of Bryde’s and sei whales. It is this kind of barbarity that Paul Watson has spent much of his life trying to prevent.

To add to his confrontations at sea, he has been a master of gaining publicity and his hugely successful US TV documentary series, Whale Wars, was viewed by millions, ramped up opposition to whaling and got right up the nose of the Japanese government.

It had a huge impact and in 2019, Japan ended its operations in Antarctica and withdrew from the IWC. It then dropped the pretence that its whaling was for scientific reasons and openly declared it was resuming commercial whaling but restricted itself to its home waters 200 miles around Japan. In 2021, Japanese whaling vessels hunted and killed 171 minke whales, 187 Bryde’s whales and 25 sei whales – a much smaller total than from the Southern Ocean but still a morally bankrupt act.

Paul Watson is a Canadian/American citizen and in his early years, sailed with the Canadian Coast Guard before becoming a merchant seaman. He was involved with the founding of Greenpeace, has written several books and won countless awards – almost as many as the arrest warrants, extradition requests, fines and lawsuits he’s had to deal with. Now 74, he lives in France with his fourth wife, Yana Rusinovich, and their two young sons, Tiger and Murtagh. At just 10, Tiger is something of a chess whizz.

Such was the threat of multiple lawsuits against him, Paul Watson resigned from Sea Shepherd UK in 2022 in order to protect it from legal and financial peril. He then immediately formed the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, which operates under the banner Neptune’s Pirates UK, and obtained the ocean-going vessel Jean Paul de Joria, a former Scottish fisheries craft. He also has several smaller boats, to which Viva! Patron Dale Vince generously contributed.

In July 2024, Watson and his 25 strong crew of volunteers set sail in the John Paul de Joria from Hull in Yorkshire, intending to pass through the Arctic North West Passage in  order to confront Japanese whalers in the North Pacific. As they entered the port of Nuuk in Greenland to refuel, a swarm of armed police and SWAT teams stormed the boat and Watson was placed in handcuffs and carted off to prison.

A ship’s refuelling would normally pass without attention so why was an armed force waiting for it? Greenland is an autonomous region ruled by Denmark, as are the Faroe Islands, and it was they who alerted the Greenland authorities. Japan had issued an Interpol Red Notice in 2012 for the arrest and extradition of Watson for supposedly causing damage to a Japanese whaling ship, obstructing business and injuring a crew member during an encounter in Antarctic waters in February 2010 – all of which Watson denies and says he has video evidence to prove it. Denmark has no extradition treaty with Japan so why did they arrest him?

And this is where the stench of corruption and hypocrisy fills the air. Denmark is not a whaling nation but the Faroe Islands it controls are internationally condemned for their annual grind, the driving into shallow water each year of an average of 1,150 pilot whales and dolphins and hacking them to death with cleavers. And this is precisely what Japan does in Taiji cove and elsewhere, selecting some dolphins for capture and sale to aquaria then slaughtering the rest by driving spikes into them. And suddenly you understand why the Faroese grassed up Watson and why Denmark imprisoned him. What they probably didn’t reckon with was the world’s attention being focused on them and the shaking of heads in disbelief at their dubious action. Watson was convinced that if he was extradited to Japan, he would spend many years in prison and might not be seen again.

Paul Watson and his crews have tried to stop whaling and all these other atrocities, acting as the conscience of the world while most governments tut and politely condemn but stand by and do nothing. And yet it is Watson who is thrown behind bars, at the behest of a country that has flagrantly acted illegally, stuck two fingers up to the rest of the world and destroyed peaceful creatures who are an essential part of the oceans’ ecology, with their excreta providing huge quantities of nitrogen and other nutrients upon which phytoplankton, at the base of the oceanic food chain, thrive.

Japan has been accused of blatantly buying votes on the 88-strong IWC by offering tiny states ‘development’ money in return for their support for whaling. San Marino is entirely landlocked and yet it is a member of the IWC.

On 17 December 2024, after five months behind bars, Paul Watson was released from prison without charge, the Danish court saying that they had done so because Japan had refused to take into account the time he’d already served in Greenland when sentencing him. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything! It was a threadbare attempt to get shot of an immoral, embarrassing, self-interested decision that had brought them international condemnation.

Two countries other than Japan kill whales – Iceland and Norway, with Norway killing more than the other two put together. They all have welfare regulations for the slaughter of farmed animals in order to prevent suffering and yet all three allow explosive harpoons to be fired into highly intelligent, sentient creatures who can take up to 20 agonising minutes to die. All offer the same lame excuse that whaling is part of their culture and tradition. Sacrificing virgins at the full moon was tradition, as was bull and bear baiting and otter hunting. We’re still fighting the remnants of this claim over fox hunting as hunters lie, ignore the law and still slaughter foxes almost without hinderance.

On a civilised, humane and compassionate level, whaling is an obscenity but the message it communicates is even more profound than this. It is about three extraordinarily well-educated, wealthy countries pandering to a few powerful lobbyists in return for… what? Something financial you can be certain! In Norway and Iceland, few people eat whale meat and much of it goes into animal food. In Japan, attitudes towards whaling are roughly evenly divided but that’s on the basis of heavy propaganda and a $10 million subsidy from the government in support of the whaling industry.

This Luddite response to an environmental and humanitarian disaster is deeply depressing. They know the science as well as we do – that the world is in crisis in whichever direction you care to look as wildlife disappears, ecosystems near collapse and the ravages of humankind continue almost unabated. It would cost them nothing to abandon this indefensible cruelty but they won’t. So what happens when they are called upon to  take really painful measures to help save the world? Doesn’t bode well, does it?