whaling

It’s decision time today for the future of the giant mammal as a U.N. top court rules whether Japan has the right to hunt whales in the Antarctic. Australia has asked the International Court of Justice to stop Japan’s whale hunt claiming their program is not scientific but commercial, because of its large scale.

Science doesn’t always get a lot of breaks, it’s constantly twisted and misrepresented in the media, and sometimes the best intentions end up being used in ways the scientists themselves would never want them to be or condone. Who’d have thought, for example, that UK universities could be used to defend commercial whaling? Yet, that's exactlly what's happening right now.

Sorry these pictures are grim, but it's important we get the message out.

This morning, one of our undercover photographers sent pictures showing a magnificent fin whale being harpooned and diced up by an Icelandic ship.

The contentious thing at this year’s International Whaling Committee (IWC) annual meeting wasn’t whaling, but bizarrely it was the issue of ‘consensus’.