Founder of Sea Shepherd Arrested in Germany

[Furcifer]

Sometimes.

Not this time. It's just not happening.

Sea Shepherds are tools. Worse, they are comfortable with bending and/or breaking certain rules in the furtherance of what they consider to be a justifiable goal, which is kind of what they accuse the Japanese of doing.

No, the IWC and the governments responsible are tools. There's no excuse for it taking as long as it has to iron this out. You're allowimng yourself to be strung along.
It does not take this long. Period.

 

[Silly Green Monkey]

I can't open the link but I can safely say the Japanese killed millions of whales off the SS watch, and not nearly as many on their watch so the website is wrong.

Why can you say this? Gut feeling? 'MUST' be true?

 

[Locknar]

What proof did I say I could provide?

See here:

So far this is just an unsupported claim. If he's "entrenching" people there should be proof. I can prove his wackiness has led to the Japanese calling their season short.Love em or hate em clowns still draw people to the circus.

NOTE: Hilite added by Locknar

Here is another link re whale catch by year/country through 2009: http://www.wdcs.co.uk/whaling_graphs/main.swf

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Because some nutjob in Alaska wants to license his dinghy as a commercial boat

You have no idea what you are talking about, despite numerous corrections.
The boats are not licensed. It is strictly the act of selling that is licensed, and the license is held by the individual, not the boat. There are restrictions on gear, or maximum boat size you can use or whatever but it is the individual that is permitted and not the boat.


A lot of these "nutjobs" as you call them make more in one month than you do in an entire year. There's something like 1,800 nutjobs in just one fishery like the Bristol Bay drift gillnet fishery. These are small boats and the permit holders are probably going to net over $50K on average this year. Not gross. Net, in one month. It varies wildly from year to year because ex-vessel salmon prices vary so much. A good fisherman will make twice what a poor one makes.

That fishery has a maximum boat size of 32 feet. So it's pretty hilarious seeing you completely ignorant of commercial fishing, yet spouting off crap with such confidence.

 

[applecorped]

So it's pretty hilarious seeing you completely ignorant of commercial fishing, yet spouting off crap with such confidence.

 

[Checkmite]

No, the IWC and the governments responsible are tools. There's no excuse for it taking as long as it has to iron this out. You're allowimng yourself to be strung along.
It does not take this long. Period.

"It does not take this long"? Really? Sure looks like it to me. What's your reference - that other time whaling was almost completely abolished from the Earth except for a couple of rebel countries and several whale species were snatched from the brink of extinction and recovered to healthy populations? That time? Hmm, I forget how long it took that time. Probably because this is the first time it's happened.

 

[Checkmite]

I guess you'd have to look at the catch before the SS and after. Anyone know what it was?

According to this site (http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=5894) more whales have been killed on the Sea Shepherd's "watch" then before they started.

I can't open the link but I can safely say the Japanese killed millions of whales off the SS watch, and not nearly as many on their watch so the website is wrong.

*facepalm*

 

[Furcifer]

See here:


Here is another link re whale catch by year/country through 2009: http://www.wdcs.co.uk/whaling_graphs/main.swf

Sorry, the page comes up completely blank. Maybe you could summarize it? Does it show any correlation at all?

 

[Furcifer]

"It does not take this long"? Really? Sure looks like it to me. What's your reference - that other time whaling was almost completely abolished from the Earth except for a couple of rebel countries and several whale species were snatched from the brink of extinction and recovered to healthy populations? That time? Hmm, I forget how long it took that time. Probably because this is the first time it's happened.

The first time they decided to put a man on the moon it didn't take this long.

Maybe whalers are just morons? That would explain a lot.

 

[Furcifer]

You have no idea what you are talking about, despite numerous corrections.
The boats are not licensed. It is strictly the act of selling that is licensed, and the license is held by the individual, not the boat. There are restrictions on gear, or maximum boat size you can use or whatever but it is the individual that is permitted and not the boat.


A lot of these "nutjobs" as you call them make more in one month than you do in an entire year. There's something like 1,800 nutjobs in just one fishery like the Bristol Bay drift gillnet fishery. These are small boats and the permit holders are probably going to net over $50K on average this year. Not gross. Net, in one month. It varies wildly from year to year because ex-vessel salmon prices vary so much. A good fisherman will make twice what a poor one makes.

That fishery has a maximum boat size of 32 feet. So it's pretty hilarious seeing you completely ignorant of commercial fishing, yet spouting off crap with such confidence.

Nonsense. Vessels are registered as commercial or recreational. You don't know what you are talking about or your failed logic is leading you to these erroneous conclusions.

eta: not quite, although making half of what I make in 1 month would be impressive. I'm a stationary engineer making the high end of what my field makes. You're lying, fishermen don't make anywhere near what we make. I know, all of this is tracked in Canada and the US. I can cite the NOC code for my profession and the average salaries for everyone in Canada if you'd like.
Fishermen making $50K a month, and yet it's one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the World. Go figure

 

[RandFan]

http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=5894

Sea Shepherd claims that their actions in the Southern Ocean opposing Japanese whaling fleets has effectively reduced the number of whales killed. What always rubbed me the wrong way about these claims is that they always compare their success against the Institute for Cetacean Research (the Japanese organization that oversees ‘scientific whaling’) Quotas. So at some point you have to ask the question, in absolute numbers, has Sea Shepherd really reduced the number of whales killed? To answer that we need three pieces of information:

1. When did Sea Shepherd begin it’s campaign against Japanese ‘scientific whaling’?
2. What are the ICR quotas for that time frame?
3. What are the absolute catches for that time frame?

Sea Shepherd provides a comprehensive timeline for their whaling campaigns that indicates serious opposition in the Southern Ocean began in December 2002. For the two other questions, we turn to Whale and Dolphin Conservation International, who have produced a truly exceptional interactive graph of the history of whaling since the inception of the International Whaling Convention by the numbers. The relevant figure is reproduced below:

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

So in 2002 the quota was about 400 a year, and they were taking slightly more than quota. Sea Shepards start operation and the whaling fleet takes around 200 whales a year for a couple of years, so way below quota. Then they ramp the quota way way up to 1000 in 2005, and that year take a lot more whales, 800 or so. Sea Shepards ramp up their activity too, and again the whale harvest falls way off, to somewhere just over 500 in 2010 That looks like an effective antiwhaling campaign to me. Unless someone wants to argue that the reason they were only able to harvest 800 whales that one year was because they overfished and depleted the population.

 

[Checkmite]

The first time they decided to put a man on the moon it didn't take this long.

It didn't take this long the first time I learned to tie my shoes, either.

I have a feeling that it will take us a while to figure out what moon landings and shoe-tying have to do with whaling, though.

 

[Checkmite]

So in 2002 the quota was about 400 a year, and they were taking slightly more than quota. Sea Shepards start operation and the whaling fleet takes around 200 whales a year for a couple of years, so way below quota. Then they ramp the quota way way up to 1000 in 2005, and that year take a lot more whales, 800 or so. Sea Shepards ramp up their activity too, and again the whale harvest falls way off, to somewhere just over 500 in 2010 That looks like an effective antiwhaling campaign to me. Unless someone wants to argue that the reason they were only able to harvest 800 whales that one year was because they overfished and depleted the population.

So in other words, the accomplishments of Sea Shepherds' whale-saving efforts include:

1. Japan doubling its whaling limit, and

2. Japan's average yearly take remaining about the same for almost the last decade.

Nice job, guys. Really inspiring.

 

[Korren]

That looks like an effective antiwhaling campaign to me.

Not really. Compare with the Norwegian whaling where Sea Shepherd has been conspicously absent for the last decade: Last year the quota was set to 1,286 minke whales, but the catch was only 533 animals.

The quota is a maximum value, not a target value. The number of whales actually caught depends on the number of vessels involved, weather and sea conditions, market demand, prices and other economic factors as well as how lucky the whalers are when it comes to finding whales.

Unless someone wants to argue that the reason they were only able to harvest 800 whales that one year was because they overfished and depleted the population.

The population of minke whales they are catching from is estimated to between 500,000 to 1,100,000 so, hardly.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Nonsense. Vessels are registered as commercial or recreational. You don't know what you are talking about or your failed logic is leading you to these erroneous conclusions.

eta: not quite, although making half of what I make in 1 month would be impressive. I'm a stationary engineer making the high end of what my field makes. You're lying, fishermen don't make anywhere near what we make. I know, all of this is tracked in Canada and the US. I can cite the NOC code for my profession and the average salaries for everyone in Canada if you'd like.
Fishermen making $50K a month, and yet it's one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the World. Go figure

Oh really? Here is the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission report on permit earnings from 1975 to 2007:

http://www.cfec.state.ak.us/RESEARCH/09_1N/09_1N.pdf

I call your attention to Page 10, table 3, the drift gillnet fishery which I just mentioned. As I said it varies tremendously according to the ex-vessel price. It is roughly $60,000 average earnings for a one-month fishery. But it has been below $20K in disasterous years and over $100K in good years.

The price of Reds is more like $1.50 now in comparison to 50-60 cents a pound in 2005-2007. This is going to be a very good year for permit holders, and there will be fishermen in the Bristol Bay drift gillnet fishery making more in one month than you do in an entire year this year.


This is a listing of permits for sale in Alaska, everything from clams to crabs and salmon. You can see that almost all of these permits are sold without reference to a boat or gear:

http://www.alaskabroker.com/listings/permits.html


That's because it is not the boat that is permitted. It is the holder of the permit. This is the only place I have commercial fished, and I know how it works here. This is the biggest fishery in the USA.

 

[Wildy]

Compare and discuss the capacity and quantity of an Indonesia vessel vs. the Maru.

No. Why don't you do it instead since you're the one going about capacity and its relation to commercial status.

No. It varies from country to country and from species to species.

So why act as if it's the same everywhere?

Why, becuase you don't understand the difference between minimums and maximums, upper and lower limits? Because some nutjob in Alaska wants to license his dinghy as a commercial boat, and it would be allowed, what's being done in Indonesia is no different from what's being done in Japan???

So what you are saying here is that you have the right to demand things from others but they don't have the right to demand anything from you?

Then again I'm not the one who defined "commercial whaling vessel" as "the largest relevant whaling vessel".

I think it depends on what the capacity of the ships is...

Is this carrying capacity? Otherwise you're pretty much waffling on for the rest of this paragraph.

...what facilities they have onboard...

Such as?

...whether the catch is kept for domestic use or if it's exported...

In the case of Greenland, which I think this paragraph is responding to, it's kept for domestic use.

...and whether or not the fish coastal or international waters.

Would that really matter if they were?

 

[Dragoonster]

It's funny (not) that one of the foremost human defenders of whales is such an amazing **** that he actually tends neutral observers to side with Japanese "research" whaler killing machines rather than him.

Then again, if he can even in his ****ness force less whales to die per season, he's certainly fulfilled his own objective.

I guess my main thing is WHO works on those Japanese boats. The boats way overkill whales for unbelievably dubious purposes...yet who are their crew? Do they deserve being inundated with stink bombs and glass shards? With being hit by a vessel, putting their lives in danger? If Japanese crews are complicit and thus deserve death etc to stop whaling even though they're random civilians trying to get a paycheck, surely other Japanese civilians do to.

Or even moreso. I'd expect some terrorism aimed at anyone in Japan who consumes whale flesh. Such folk would be willingly spending yen to do this, unlike the common whaling crew.

This is kind of my take on Chinese medicinal BS. Sure, I'd like to kill poachers in Africa. But if all Chinese who willingly spend money on rhino horn etc. BS are killed, same end result, and with much more deserved death, as the poachers might be just doing a job to keep their family fed.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

So in other words, the accomplishments of Sea Shepherds' whale-saving efforts include:

1. Japan doubling its whaling limit, and

2. Japan's average yearly take remaining about the same for almost the last decade.

Nice job, guys. Really inspiring.

In theory, you'd think that on a board dedicated to critical thinking people would change their minds when confronted with hard facts that contradict their prejudices. As opposed to blustering randomly and retaining their now-falsified beliefs.

In theory.

 

[Furcifer]

No. Why don't you do it instead since you're the one going about capacity and its relation to commercial status.



So why act as if it's the same everywhere?



So what you are saying here is that you have the right to demand things from others but they don't have the right to demand anything from you?

Then again I'm not the one who defined "commercial whaling vessel" as "the largest relevant whaling vessel".



Is this carrying capacity? Otherwise you're pretty much waffling on for the rest of this paragraph.



Such as?



In the case of Greenland, which I think this paragraph is responding to, it's kept for domestic use.



Would that really matter if they were?

Because it's a very simple concept. Sport or recreational fishing is based on capacity. When the capacity with very basic gear is exceeded they impose limits. Once your capacity is greater than what would reasonably considered a "personal" amount they consider you a commercial fisherman. This is regardless of whether or not you sell the catch.
This is a reasonable way of dismissing the claim that these "traditional" hunts are the same thing as what the Japanese are doing with these "research" vessels. There's sport fishing and there's commercial fishing.

I'm not acting as if it's the same everywhere, in fact I clearly stated otherwise up thread. Why lie about it?

No, I'm saying I'm limited by my technology. I asked if you could keep it to one paragraph so I could respond but you can't do that obviously.

It's called causality. The fact that the Japanese are using some 300 foot floating processing plant inherently means they're operating commercially. It's a lot more of a grey area when your boat is smaller than the whale and you're using sharp sticks instead of an air powered cannon.

Such as what? I can't see that you're responding to and can't open another window to find out. Not that it matters, I've made my point in the above paragraphs.

I haven't waffled, I've maintained the same thing from the beginning; it's absurd to compare these traditional hunts to commercial whaling simply because they may sell or trade the catch afterwards. To say "it's just a matter of scale" when clearly the problem with whaling is the scale on which it was done is moronic.