Does anyone watch "Whale Wars" on Friday nights, on animal planet?

Nope

@janbb Nope what? you don’t watch it or you don’t think it is an act of war?

Oh sorry – nope,don’t watch it.

@janbb That’s too bad. It is very exciting and interesting. It is on right now.

Oh no. I watched it last week. Those are some passionate brave folks. destroying ships is a pirate tactic. I wish the UN or someone would represent the animal kingdom as well, and put the whalers out of business.

Since govts do wage act against pirates, I think they definitely should retaliate, and consider this an act of war.

It is on every Friday night. What the Japanese ship did was criminal. I would call it attempted murder as well.

. . . I thought that show would be where they trained whales to do battle with eachother. I was sorely disappointed.

I watch it… when it’s on and I have nothing else to do.

I don’t watch Whale Wars—I do not feel that cable TV would benefit my life enough to justify its cost—but I do think that ramming a ship with your ship is kinda dangerous, both for the other guy and for your own vessel. Dangerous enough, in fact, that I’d bet that it wasn’t deliberate.
Was the Ady Gil deliberately making an obstacle of itself? Because if it was, I’d say that the owners were pretty much asking to be hit.

@jazmina88 Power is precisely what you don’t want the UN to have a lot of. Especially regulatory power.

Yea, I watched it. And it was a very deliberate hit. If you can go back and watch it on demand, there is a part where it shows video and audio from someone aboard the Shonan Maru No.2. What the crew member says sounds so rehearsed it made me laugh.

Was it this video? Or is it this one?

“this one”

@Nullo No they were out of fuel and dead in the water. They were waiting for their big ship to come assist. If you notice the Japanese ship turned right into the Ady Gil at the last minute while drowning them with water.

@RANGIEBABY It looked in this video like the boat accelerated into the path of the Shonan Maru at the last second.

@Nullo I watched the episode 3 times. All the men were out laying around on the small boat. It was at the mercy of the waves. If you saw the episode you could see the captain of the little boat topside and joking around with the other mates. It is possible a wave threw them forward, but the big ship had no business coming that close to the little boat in the first place.

@RANGIEBABY As I explained a couple of posts ago, cable TV would not enrich my life enough to offset its expenses.
Wave-throwings do not generate wakes. Boats moving to ram ships, on the other hand, do.

Since Sea Shepherd has, in the past, demonstrated a willingness both to ram whaling ships and make spectacles of themselves, I find it reasonable to suppose that they combined the two this time in order to generate all of this negative publicity.

I might counter that the boat had no business being in the way of the whaler. There are nicer parts of the ocean to have a granola-and-wheat-grass-smoothie party.

Why the close pass? I shall speculate some.
The above video features a shrill alarm. I imagine that it was triggered by the Sea Shepherd people in order to scare off any whales that might be in the area.
Now picture this: You’re at work, trying to finish a project before you go home. And a guy who doesn’t like your company very much barges into your workspace and starts making a nuisance of himself. He disrupts your stuff, he tries to shine a laser into your eyes, and screams obscenities at you the whole time. He even goes out of his way to make you look bad to other people. And no matter how many times you tell him to leave you alone, he won’t.
I don’t know much about you, and I know nothing at all about the skipper of the Shonan Maru. But I do know that if I had a guy constantly harassing me, I’d get very blustery, eventually call the police, or else get somewhat aggressive with the oven cleaner and my roasting spits. That would also likely be my last day at work.
Would my assaulting a now-former potential customer put me in the right? No though I am permitted to defend myself from overzealous shoppers. But a person’s patience can only stretch so thin before it snaps. As it is with meat-roasters, so it is with whalers.

@Nullo I just find it difficult to believe that many people on the Ady Gil would be willing to commit suicide. Because they all could have easily been knocked overboard and sucked into the props of the big boat. Their purpose is of course to stop the massacre of the whales.

“Whales are people too, man!”

Whaling is just one atrocity of many, and a fairly minor one compared to almost any other I can pull off the top of my head. It’s fucked up, but there are greater things to worry about. The whaling is, like so many other foolish behaviors, a symptom. These people are self-righteous. It’s proven if only by their devotion to such a short-sighted cause.

@RANGIEBABY Keep in mind that not everybody on the water is entirely rational. Heck, most people aren’t entirely rational throughout the day-to-day. I, too, don’t think that they were consciously risking their lives. But sometimes you have what you think is a good idea, and you go with it. “Dude, we can make the news!” can and sometimes does take precedence over more reasonable courses of action.

@zophu Yes, save the whales, abort your children. :\
Not all hunting is bad, you know. Here in Missouri, for instance, the Conservation Department enlists the aid of the state’s hunters to keep the deer population in check by regulating the number of hunting tags sold and what the tags permit. If not for them, the deer (whose natural predators have for the most part left the area) would very quickly overwhelm their food supply, and die off.
The comments appended to those videos suggested, among other, less printable things, that there was a population control element to the hunt, as well as a research component.