Sea Vegans ~ Dr. Roger Yates

[Carolyn Bailey]

This blog entry is a brief update to an earlier one about whaling and
dolphin campaigns.[1] I pointed out in that earlier post that my
Japanese partner shared her countryfolk’s hatred of organisations like
Greenpeace who the Japanese see as hypocritically telling them what to
do in terms of animal use while they themselves eat meat. Sea Shepherd,
because they are a vegan organisation, was a different issue.

Recently the Japanese government issued an arrest warrant against a Dutch crew
member of Sea Shepherd and this renewed the discourse about Westerners
imposing their values on others on Japanese Yahoo news sites. The
pattern of complaint against Sea Shepherd was familiar: who are these
people to tell us that we cannot kill whales when they themselves eat
meat? What’s so special about whales in the first place? These are just
hypocritical cultural imperialists. So my partner wrote in reiterating
the point about how Sea Shepherd operate vegan ships. The response was
that most people apparently did not know this and, once again, when
told, this served to differentiate Sea Shepherd from the likes of
Greenpeace.

Perhaps Sea Shepherd should publicise their veganism a little more in order to avoid accusations of cultural bias?


[1] http://human-nonhuman.blogspot.com/2008/08/something-fishy-about-campaigns-about.html

http://human-nonhuman.blogspot.com/2008/12/sea-vegans.html

[blackpanther]

and what about Pete Bethune eating meat on his journey back home??????? not really vegan!!!!