Would You Like Some Irony with Your Beluga?

I've expressed my fondness for whales before on this blog, so I can't say that I'm terribly unhappy about a story I read online today.
A little background: Japan, along with several other countries, participates in whaling each winter under the guise of 'research,' but this is pretty much total BS. Whatever 'research' that may be going has the not-so-coincidental fringe benefit of providing Japan with lots of tasty, expensive whale meat, which my wife and her country-folk devour with pleasure, while self-righteous foreigners like me look on in disgust. Now is prime whaling season, so the Japanese fleet has been in Antarctica since December or so.
This is the Nisshin Maru. It's what's known as a factory ship; they catch and process the whales completely on the decks of this ship. It's kind of the lynch-pin in the Japanese whaling fleet since nobody is allowed to set up any processing facilities on Antarctica itself.



This is a typical day on board the Nisshin Maru. Bloody eh?



Oh, sorry. They actually ARE doing research activities. I mean, they have signs...in English!!

The folks at Greenpeace annually go down and interfere with Japan's attempts at research. They run around in their fast little boats heckling and harassing the researchers, who in turn blast them with water canons.

When the heckling and harassing grows ineffective, these crazy SOB's actually jump into the water and float in front of the boat. Floating in front of a giant ship is one thing, but it's freaking Antarctica to boot.

So here's the thing. The Nisshin Maru is on fire right now, and you know what's keeping that fire going? Whale oil! Environmentalists are displaying shit-eating grins around the world, and they didn't even have anything to do with this.

Bumping up the irony factor a bit is that last week Japan held a summit to try and convince non-whaling countries to let whaling-countries kill more whales, but none of the non-whaling countries showed up.

Some folks are going a little far declaring this the end of Japanese whaling, which I don't really see as the case. They'll probably just build another boat, with more powerful water cannons. But for now, chalk one up for the whales. Yay whales.

You can read for yourself here and here. And you can check out the evironmental crazies here.