One step closer to the slaughter

Japan and its axis of extinction are at it again. This week, in the spirit of xenocide, they won an important vote at the International Whaling Commission; one more step towards the cleansing of the oceans. The Syndey Morning Herald had this to say:

THE image flickered across a screen at the International Whaling Commission meeting almost too quickly to catch. Could it be…? Early in the post-lunch session, Japan was dashing through a Powerpoint show of its Antarctic whaling. As hundreds of delegates settled their stomachs, graphs and dot points blinked out of the projector.

Then there it was. A sleek hill of whale, silver belly and grey back, with little helmeted men clambering over it. They looked like Lilliputians with a marine Gulliver. It was a fin whale, harpooned by the Japanese.

The fin whale, the second-largest animal in existence after the blue whale, are built like trains - up to 27 metres long, and able to propel their 127-tonne bodies as fast as 25 knots. "They are a fast-moving, wide-ranging animal of the deeper seas," says Mark Simmons, the science director for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. "They have evolved to travel far, and go for a long time without food. And they are very hard to actually see."

Fin whales are rarely sighted off Australian coasts. They are an endangered species, after 720,000 were killed in the southern hemisphere after World War II. At that time they formed the mainstay of Antarctic industrial whaling, boiled down for oil and later selected by Japanese whalers for their meat. Today there is no agreed count of their number. But last summer Japan began killing them again in its scientific hunt and this was the first time the result had been seen publicly.

Saving the whales for extinction was the one great victory of environmentalism, quite possibly its only victory. Make no mistake, we are fast heading towards a less-rich, piss-poor world with only cockroaches, humans, pets, rats, algae and disease as inhabitants. Intelligent species my ass.

In related news, ten Greenpeace activists were arrested in St. Kitts (where the meeting of the Commission was held) for daring to make a fuss.