Paul Watson Interviewed: Sea Shepherd In Australian Port NOW! 

By Claudette Vaughan, November, 2005

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) is currently undertaking a campaign to take on the illegal Japanese whaling fleet. Captained by Paul Watson, the flagship Farley Mowat will depart from Melbourne, Australia, on December 1st on a course south to the coast of Antarctica. Their objective is to track the Japanese whaling fleet and block, obstruct and intervene against their illegal activities.  The Sea Shepherd needs $100,000 worth of supplies for their 2-month voyage. The local campaign has opened with pledges of $20,000 worth of biodiesel, food and whale-watching vouchers. One easy thing that can be done for the SSCS and that is to join them today to support this campaign and their important work.

Paul Watson

Donations can be made at www.seashepherd.org

CV. Have you and the crew received a warm Aussie welcome since your arrival a few days ago?

PW. Everybody in Melbourne's been very friendly especially the construction workers down here who have been very supportive of us.

CV. Was there any trouble docking?

PW. Yes. We had a glitch in that there were rules here that we weren't aware of so we had to get further insurance that we didn't have.

CV. The Farley Mowat is heading to Antarctica now for 2 months in order to take on the illegal Japanese whaling. Are you picking up crew while you're here?

PW. We have quite a few volunteers joining us. We'll have a crew of about 40 when we leave. We came in with a crew of 19.

CV. Do land lubbers realise that 2 months at sea is the equivalent of 2 years on land?

PW. Well, I find it more comfortable out there.

(laughter)

CV. What makes for a good volunteer? What attributes makes for a great crew member apart from getting your sea legs quickly?

PW.  A willingness to take the risks and work hard to accomplish our goals together is all important. I look on it as a ‘Tom Sawyer' approach. People pay their own way to work hard and take risks and this is because they really believe in it. Over the years I've had over 3500 volunteers, as crew,  on the ship. I think too that it's a good learning experience for a lot of people. It certainly empowers people.

CV. It's been over 30 years now.  You have sank a total of  9 whaling ships. If Cleveland Amory were alive today (he funded the first ever Sea Shepherd and wrote the book Man Kind! Our Incredible War on Wildlife) what do you think he would say today of your great successes?

PW. Cleveland was very supportive of the Sea Shepherd and everything we did up until 1998 when he died. I could always count on Cleveland's support. It was a sad day when he did die.

CV. I'm surmising that perhaps one of the problems the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has is finding enough funding to support financially every campaign that is waged. Would this be correct?

PW. It's always a problem because we are a small organisation and in a way it's kind of a Catch 22 situation. We are a small organisation because we spend all of our money on our campaigns not on raising more money. If we were to spend our time and money on raising more money then we wouldn't be able to do campaigns. I think it's better to be small and flexible.

CV. In doing research for this interview I found wading through the rhetoric of the whaling literature worse than a vivisectors bureaucracy. Our Federal Minister for the Environment, Ian Campbell, spoke boldly against whaling for commercial purposes at the recent International Whaling Commission (IWC) conference yet Australia is one of the few countries left, along with America, that refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol. A few days ago Campbell ruled out taking legal action against Japan because, “if the government thought seeking legal redress would stop the whaling, [much of it in Australian waters] it would already have done so”.  How do you and how does the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society deal with the politicking of it all? Is it all just bullshit?

PW. Governments are very good at talking up the lie but not in acting. What Australia has effectively done here is surrender the Australian Antarctic territory to Japan. They might as well call it the ‘Japanese Antarctic territory'. They have failed in their responsibility to defend the sovereignty of this territory. They are doing this because they are afraid of the Japanese. Japan is accomplishing today what it failed to accomplish last century. It's now accomplishing through economic bullying what it couldn't accomplish through military bullying. In other words, they have declared war on Australia and Australia has surrendered. It's as simple as that. Why? Because most countries have become nations of prostitutes where they are ready to prostitute all of their principles in the interest of Trade and of course they are afraid of Japan because it's a big economic power.

CV. Are we only talking here about Trade and Commerce?  There is a war against free roaming animals going on virtually unimpeded everywhere in the world today. Is monetary gain the only incentive to act like this?

PW. I think it's completely all about money. Most governments now work for corporations. They don't work for the people. They certainly don't work for the environment or wildlife species unless it's in their interest to do so. For instance, Australia is very aggressive in pursuing the Indonesian poachers from poorer countries but the message that they are sending is if you are a rich and powerful nation like Japan you can do whatever you want, we'll just turn a blind eye.

CV. I've just finished reading your brilliant article, ‘Polluting the English Language to Justify Slaughter' and I hope you'll do some more writing on that topic because the whalers language is a language of exploiters with still a lot of work to do in this area. E.g., seriously depleted stocks, scientific hunt, ‘the great natural resources represented by whale stocks' etc. Can language be the medium to close the divide between animal liberationists and environmentalists? I ask because a liberationist view understands the importance of the individual animal yet the environmentalist is still talking in terms of “the numbers” and stock depletion. What's your view on this Paul?

PW. I have always been a person who has been proposing that environmentalists, animal rights, welfarists and liberationists all get together – we're all on the same track here. I don't know why there is so much diversion. We should be able to agree to disagree on certain things but at the same time we have to understand that everything is interconnected and that we do have to look at wilderness and wildlife and animals with a different eye. Anybody who says that animals are not capable of feeling any pain is being willfully ignorant and that comes out of human arrogance really. Not only do we want to change the language on how we describe the way these animals are exploited but I'm trying to change the names of the whales themselves. Whales are named after their killers.

CV. Paul, please tell us about your encounter with the first whale you met back in 1975.

PW.  Around 1975 while we were blocking the Russian vessels I had a harpoon fired overhead which struck one of the whales of the pod. The male sperm whale of the pod turned to defend himself and he hurled himself at the Soviet vessel. They were ready for him and fired on him. The whale fell back in pain and was struggling and riding on the surface of the sea. When I caught his eye he saw me with a trail of bloody bubbles coming straight towards us. The whale came up and out of the water. He was ready to come forward and crush us. I looked up into this eye and what I saw really changed my life forever because the whale understood what we were trying to do. With a great effort the whale fell back and I saw him disappear beneath the sea and he died. That whale could have taken my life but he chose not to do so. I have felt indebted to that whale for my very life. Ever since I've tried to save as many whales as possible to repay that debt.

CV. That's a remarkable story. Direct action itself is never easy. It's not an easy road, especially out at sea because the outcomes can never be guaranteed yet it's this very unpredictability factor that leads to much of its success. It's probably the best tactic the movement has at the moment.

PW. What we do is enforce international law against illegal activities. We actually do it through legal means. I have never been convicted of a crime. We've never injured anybody.  Because of the media and the money being, made many times the public have failed to recognise one true fact and that is our opponents are criminals. So we do destroy their property but we don't do that illegally and that's why we have never been charged because that property is being used illegally to take life.

CV. What is your theory on beached and stranded whales and why they are doing this and why the proliferation now?

PW. There's a lot of theories on that. One of the theories that has a lot of evidence to back it up is when a whale is dying it's a very painful death to drown. They lose their strength and so they drown. It's much quicker for them to beach themselves. They die in less time and with less pain. In a way that's like a voluntary euthanasia. It's not really any different from a cancer victim who chooses to take their own life. That's just one theory. I do know that a lot of the strandings recently is because of testing by the military which literally blows the whales eardrums out and they no longer have a sense of direction.

CV. Are you cynical about all these Commissions set up to oppose commercial whaling yet their fundamental flaw is in their failure to act consistently, if at all? Aren't moratoriums a way of giving the Industry itself breathing space to replenish ‘stock' levels of whales for the next round of slaughter yet they can still look like they're doing something environmental?

PW. The International Whaling Commission was set up in 1946 by whaling countries to regulate whaling for the interests of the whalers so it's always been a whaling organisation. In the 70's more non-whaling organisations joined it – conservationist nations. They were able to get enough control to bring in the moratorium we had in 1986 so the International Whaling Commission is now dominated by anti-whaling nations which is good. Unfortunately it has no enforcement powers. Infact we are the only organisation that enforces them. The problem is they are the only regulatory body that we have when it comes to whaling. It's good for us because we can use the regulations, moratoriums and rules as a base for our enforcement actions. We appreciate that but the IWC is slowly being taken over by the Japanese who keep bribing other nations to join. What we need is other countries like Australia, New Zealand and France to start paying the membership of other nations that are conservation oriented to join so to counter the Japanese.

CV. The ramming techniques that you first initiated – have they been taken up by anyone else?

PW. No we are the only group that does that. Most other groups are very critical of our activities not that we really care.

CV.  All these years later and the oceans are safer because the Sea Shepherd and Paul Watson are out there putting their lives on the line for the whales and dolphins.

PW. Well we like to think so. People can follow our activities on this campaign by tuning into our website.

www.seashepherd.org