Captain Paul Watson Responds to the Article “Whaler Friends” By Ady Gil Whaler Friends By Ady Gil AG: One should be so blessed, as I feel right now, to have spent the past week in the Faroe Islands. Visiting so many places in the world, I have never have I felt so welcomed anywhere else. Welcoming Pete Bethune and I was not an easy task for the people there. After all, the evidence showed that we were “Anti Whaling”, and we were visiting a “Whaling Country”. Despite all of that, we had the most amazing experience and the warmest welcome. PW: One week in the Faroe Islands and Ady Gil considers himself an expert on the situation. Of course he had a warm welcome. He was there to denounce Sea Shepherd. I’m sure they were quite happy to welcome Pete Bethune. After all he turned me over to the Japanese authorities and that made him somewhat of a hero in their eyes. AG: It started with Marita at the airport. She saw two strangers that rented a car from her place, that had no hotel room for the night. She invited us to her house to use her spare bedrooms. Marita also introduced us to her 15 years old niece Anja, who later found out that we were not in favor of whaling to say the least, or we could have been Sea Shepherd spies. We had to regain her trust. PW: Why would Ady Gil and Pete Bethune have to regain the trust of the whalers? They had never said anything in opposition before about Faroese whaling. They never before opposed Faroese whaling. They were not in the Faroes to opposie whaling so it is a mystery as to what trust Ady felt needed to be regained. And why does he require the trust of the whalers? And why did Ady Gil the millionaire not have a reservation for a hotel? That sounds a little conveniently fishy to me. He had radio and TV interviews already scheduled for the next morning yet had not bothered to get a hotel room. AG: The next morning we went to do a radio interview, it was live and we could have said anything that we wanted. Later in the day we had our TV interview right on one of the Grint (Grind) beaches. PW: And they did take the opportunity to denounce the brave and passionate Sea Shepherd volunteers who were in the Faroes to oppose the slaughter of the pilot whales. They said exactly what they wanted and more importantly they said exactly what the Faroese whalers wanted to hear. AG: It was so hard for us, we wanted to hate them but we just could not. As people, there was nothing to hate. Slowly I started to get it. I started to understand what it is like to live on small islands, where nothing grows, maybe a few potatoes; with no army or navy; with only one TV station; without big corporate America. You do what you can to survive. PW: No one in Sea Shepherd has ever hated the Faroese nor does anyone in Sea Shepherd hate them now. Sea Shepherd volunteers are in the Faroes and have been there in the past to oppose the killing of whales and not to hate the Faroese people. Unlike Ady and Pete, we actually never wanted to hate the Faroese. However for Ady to say there was nothing to hate is wrong. The Grind is something to hate. The butchery of innocent self-aware intelligent sentient beings is something that we can hate and that we hate to see continued. As for the Navy, they have the Danish Navy to protect the Grind so Ady is wrong when he says there is no Navy. Where nothing grows? Well there are greenhouses and there are regular supply ships providing Faroese super markets with everything that can be obtained at any super market in Europe. For Ady to say this is about survival is incredibly naïve. AG: Whale hunting is a bizarre thing for me. They are so much into this culture. It came from times when they were starving, and the sea got them the meat to eat. It is like a religion to them. Maybe in their subconscious it is still like a gift from GOD. I talked to a guy who is one of the leaders of the “Grind” as they call it. I told him that the world already made the decision that killing whales is wrong. I told him that he does not have the money and PR to reverse the world opinion. This battle he already lost. PW: Ady has apparently bought into the cultural justification argument. If he accepts this he should accept cock-fighting, bear-baiting, fox-hunting and bull-fighting. The point is Ady – no one is starving in the Faroes nor has anyone starved in a very long time. AG: I was asking myself, why do we hate them so much? Then it came to me. It is because they are killing the wrong animal. When I say wrong, we have been fascinated by them since Jonah in Bible. Now whales are the stars. We just love them, and we are right. They are magnificent creatures, huge, powerful, smart and yet so gentle. So we decided that whales are not on our menu. We also passed laws about it. Somehow they got better luck than the 2500 tigers left in the wild that are probably going away. There is no TV show to save them. They do not make the front page. PW: I don’t know about Ady, but Jonah has absolutely nothing to do with why I protect whales but if he wants to get Biblical he should have pointed out that in Leviticus, it is absolutely forbidden to eat whale meat. And who is this “we” that Ady states decided is not on “our menu.” Obviously it is on the menu in the Faroes, in Iceland, In Japan and in Norway. Who are the “we” that passed laws against it.” It seems that Ady feels that the pilot whales are undeserving of our help because there is no TV show about them or they are not in the news. So my questions is to Ady – why were you in the Faroes if 1. You feel there is a cultural justification and 2. You think that pilot whales are getting more attention than other animals that you feel are more deserving? Ady considers it to be “better luck” to be massacred on a beach than to be hunted in the jungle. It seems to me that both species are not very lucky to live in a world where humanity is ruthlessly dominant. AG: We love smart animals, we love cute animals, so we give these animals a break. The unfortunate ones, like the pigs for example, that are very intelligent, are just not cute. So we factory farm them, we are cruel to them, and we just buried them alive in Korea, when they got sick. Yes over one million in January 2011. PW: Again who is this “we” that Ady is referring to? Sea Shepherd defends plankton, sea cucumbers, reef fish, etc. And how is clubbing seals, stabbing whales, spearing dolphins giving “these animals a break?” AG: The people in the Faroe Islands do not do these things. The people of the Faroe Islands do not kill people – the most intelligent species out there. We do! We just call it “War” the other group that we kill is “The enemy” and that makes it right to kill people. The people of the Faroe Islands see animals as food. Cute and smart does not buy the animal a free ticket to life. Unlike us, (not us the activists that do not eat animals), they believe that an animal, before it is being consumed, needs a respectful life. As you can see in my pictures, their sheep are free, they build them little barns to escape the weather, they do not have factory farming on the islands. PW: The people of the Faroe islands eat pork, beef, chicken so they do these same things i.e. the buy butchered animals and they kill puffins and catch fish. Saying the people of the Faroes don’t kill people is ridiculous. There have been murders in the Faroes and the Faroese participated in wars in the past. I do not know of one animal rights person or conservationist who has killed anyone. I know Pete Bethune killed a man but who else is Ady referring to when he says “we” kill people? Has he killed someone that we don’t know about? To say sheep are free and have little barns built for them ignores the fact that the sheep are also killed. Americans once built little houses for slaves and they were also allowed to run freely around in the fields. AG: The whales for them are just another form of food. Just like Blue fin Tuna to us. Data is showing that blue fin tuna is about to be extinct thanks to Mitsubishi, it’s large freezers, and consumers who eat it. According to Faroe Islands statistics, there are between 100,000 to 800,000 pilot whales and they kill about 800 a year that is between 0.01%-0.08%. (IWC 1989 Numbers iwcoffice.org/conservation/estimate.htm, Wikipidea information en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Faroe_Islands) I DO NOT promote the killing of pilot whales, I think it is horrific, but if you watched the movie “Earthlings” we actually do worse. PW: The Bluefin tuna is food to “us?” Maybe Ady eats tuna fish sandwiches but I don’t, so who is this “us?” There is a big difference between 100,000 and 800,000. The fact is that no one knows the actual number and this huge discrepancy in his estimates proves just that. I notice he quotes Faroese sources and not the IUCN position that the numbers are unknown. But is Ady saying that if there are 100,000 animals, killing 800 is therefore okay? And personally I have not seen anything in Earthlings that I would judge to be worse than the Grind. Cruelty is cruelty and slaughter is slaughter Ady. His comparisons are pathetically lacking in compassion. AG: I have heard many comments that we should “Educate them”. I have to say that we can educate each other. The fact is that they will listen, and hopefully change, but Tyson Foods, MacDonald’s, KFC will not change, there is money involved. For us, in the “Western World” animals are not just food, they are a commodity, a money making machine with no feelings of pain and no emotions. We call them the “Happy cows of California”. Whom are we kidding? PW: What a defeatist attitude Ady has. Of course Tyson Foods, MacDonalds and KFC will change. That is the whole damn point of the animal rights movement – to abolish these cruel industries, to abolish factory farming. Ady obviously has resigned himself to believing that things will not change and thus he has resigned himself to believing the Grind will not be ended. Ady seems to forget that the Faroes are a part of the Western world and that the Faroese are rich because they trade in fish and their take per capita of fish ranks in the top ten fishing nations. Again who are the “we” that call cows in California, “happy?” Ady apparently thinks that the whales killed in the Faroes had the benefit of a free life before falling before the knives of the Faroese whale murderers. PW: I was curious why it was illegal to sell Pilot whale meat, and why was it shared for free around the villages where the Grind happened and access to meat is shared with the nearby villages. The answer is, that putting money into it will commercialize it and will promote greed for self profit. They also are not selling them to aquariums. Sound familiar, Japan? PW: He should have checked the supermarket where he would have found whale meat being sold to the public. Killing so many whales for such a small population is indeed greed. Ady misses the point that many of the whalers kill simply because they enjoy it. PW: I made many friends there, many Faroese became my Facebook friends, they have open discussions on my page with my activist friends. I was invited to their houses. Remember the “Virgin Knife” video. Yes, Jens invited me to his house to talk to us. Jens had killed Whales in his life. He even let Pete record our conversation. His wife just invited me to have a vegan meal at their house. They never had a vegan meal, neither did his two kids. So we are all going to eat grass for one night, as they were teasing me. PW: This virgin knife thing is simply weird to me. So a whaler gave Ady a knife and said it would not kill any whales. What is the point? There are plenty of other whalers with knives that will kill whales. If I walked into an Outback Steakhouse and the manager gave me a knife and I said this knife will never cut into a steak, would that stop people from eating steaks in that steakhouse? Ady has a great many anti-Sea Shepherd pro-whaling “friends’ on his page. I’ve noticed that.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 15:38:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015