BLOCK the publication of unethical lethal whale research!

PHOTO CREDIT: AFP PHOTO / JUNG YEON-JE. Credit: JUNG YEON-JE

I have just spent the last few hours perusing the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research.

The controversy over Japan's state-supported whaling industry was heightened when allegedly nearly 30,000,000 dollars of Japanese taxpayer money marked for earthquake recovery was siphoned off to fund research whaling in the Antarctica this year. [source]

The Institute of Cetacean Research (the baddies) asks for financial support from the general public in exchange for whale meat. It's right there on the website!

Here is the kind of lethal whale research I'd personally like to see banned:
http://www.icrwhale.org/JARPA91paper.html
http://www.icrwhale.org/NewPublication.html

I'd like to pressure all of science journals individually and convince them that the world doesn't appreciate these kinds of 'fishy' experiments.

Here's a list of scientific journals that have published whale research: The Society for Marine Mammalogy, Journal of Marine Science and Technology; Conservation Genetics; Marine Mammal Science; Comparitive Immunology, Microbiology, and Infectious Diseases; Polar Biology, Zygote, The Journal of Reproduction and Development, Chemosphere, BMC Genetics, Fisheries Oceanography, Fisheries Science, Lipids, Cloning and Stem Cells, ... and many more ...

I think it's more efficient to target major science publishers such as John Wiley and Sons, SpringerLink, Elsevier Science, Cambridge University Press and get them to stop publishing lethal whale research.

Here is the first tier membership form.
And here is the "second tier" membership information sheet.

About Kujira Tomo no Kai
The Kujira Tomo no Kai is intended to foster amity among those who approve the activities of the Institute of Cetacean Research and wish to contribute to the preservation and continuation of Japan's whale food culture and tradition through the consumption of whale meat as a byproduct of whale research.

Two types of membership
Kujira Tomo no Kai membership is available only to people living in Japan. The reason is that membership involves our delivering you a selection of whale meat food products one, two, or three times a year, depending on the membership fee chosen.

• Annual membership fee: 5,000 JPY (December delivery of a whale meat food products selection with value above this amount).
• Annual membership fee: 10,000 JPY (December and April delivery of a whale meat food products selection with value above this amount).
• Annual membership fee: 15,000 JPY (December, April and July delivery of a whale meat food products selection with value above this amount).

Its stated objective is that it needs to kill whales in order to understand the feeding ecology and population makeup of various whale species. It needs to understand this, it says, so it can "manage" whale numbers through hunting.

Now, it is true that by catching and killing whales, and analyzing their stomach contents, a lot can be learned about cetacean biology. In the past, it was the only real method available to investigate these animals. But for many years now, it has been entirely unnecessary to kill whales in order to get the information that Japan's Institute for Cetacean Research says it needs.

But it's better to collect poop than to kill whales. Collecting their feces may not be the most pleasant job in the world, but analyzing the DNA found in great dollops of whale poop floating in the open sea can tell scientists — without cutting open its stomach — what animals a whale has been eating.

Meanwhile, DNA samples can be taken with relative ease from these mighty marine mammals by removing a small plug of skin from them. And a lot can be learned from their nasal mucus (snot).

Researchers can sample a whale's breath — including its snot — by catching the gunk that spurts from its blowhole. (If you can't imagine how you could possibly get close enough to a whale's nose to do this, think creatively: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, of the Zoological Society of London, flies remote-controlled helicopters over breaching whales, catching flying snot on Petri dishes strapped to the sides of the choppers.)

From these samples, scientists can determine the viruses, fungi and bacteria that live in whales' lungs.

Killing whales provides negligible data to science. Less than 1 percent of the papers published on cetacean biology come from studies that required the killing of a whale.

In fact, tagging live whales tells you far more. GPS tags allow biologists to track whales and learn migration routes as well as daily routines. And acoustic tags record marine noise, so we can get an aural picture of the undersea soundscape — and an idea of the amount of noise pollution from boats that whales are having to tolerate. [source]

None of these publications can justify killing that many whales!
That kind of science can be done with LIVE whales.

So there it is. How long is the world going to put up with this?

How long is the international SCIENCE community going to continue to put up with this?