Japan has announced that it is leaving the IWC (International Whaling Commission) and intends to restart commercial whaling, as reported by the LA Times.

I find this news utterly disgraceful. Whales are not only mostly endangered, but are intelligent and social creatures which we really shouldn't be hunting.

It irks me that the Japanese claim that it is traditional to hunt and eat whales; this is no excuse: it is also traditional in some societies to sell people into slavery, kill unwanted female children, ban women (of menstruating age) from temples, and use religion to justify war, but that doesn't make any of those things good. It also upsets me that hardly anyone in Japan eats whale meat anymore, and the meat from the so-called scientific whaling that Japan has conducted throughout its membership of the IWC has been hard to sell.

The IWC is the perfect example of "International Law". The IWC rules only apply to nations who have signed up to them by joining the IWC, and members can leave whenever they choose. There is no enforcement system, and there are no consequences for breaking the rules. We need International Law with teeth, not just aspirations.

People will probably strongly criticise me for saying this, even though it is tongue-in-cheek, but the last time that Japan was out of control, we dropped two atom-bombs on them. Maybe is is time to repeat the lesson.

My point is that I consider the extinction of even one species a much more heinous crime than the deaths of mere hundreds of thousands of people; we have more than enough humans on this planet. Our planet is in crisis, and the widely held belief that a human is always and automatically more important than a member of another species, or indeed a whole species, is no longer valid (if it ever was).