Japan's Phony Research Whaling Proposal Is Rejected

Using a loophole in the 1986 ban on commercial whaling  the Japanese government has, each year sent research whaling ships to the Southern Ocean in their words to carry out scientific analysis of whale populations in that part of the world.  Yet, no credible research has ever been provided to the scientific community that would justify the continuation of the program.  On Monday excerpts from the International Whaling Commission rejected Japan's latest request to restart the program.   

The reason this program exists at all is to keep a few interested fisheries corporations  and their Liberal Democratic Party backers happy and along with a steady income from an unnecessary research program.

Japan’s hopes of resuming its whale hunts in the Southern Ocean have suffered a setback after International Whaling Committee experts said its latest plan offered no scientific justification for the slaughter.
The IWC panel said Japan’s revised programme, known as Newrep-A, did not contain enough information for experts to determine whether Japan needed to kill whales to fulfil two key objectives: calculating the size of populations necessary for a return to sustainable commercial hunting, and gaining a better understanding of the Antarctic marine ecosystem.
“With the information presented in the proposal, the panel was not able to determine whether lethal sampling is necessary to achieve the two major objectives,” the IWC experts’ report said. “Therefore the current proposal does not demonstrate the need for lethal sampling to achieve those objectives.”