You Don't Have to Kill a Snake to Get a Sample of Its Venom - You Do Have To Kill a Whale to Get a Sample of Its Tissue

Photo Credit: iNewsCatcher

Commercial whaling was banned worldwide in 1986.
Soon after Japan set up a non-profit Institute of Cetacean Research and has since slaughtered hundreds of ocean mammals in the name of science.

If you've ever seen an episode of Whale Wars on Animal Planet you'll notice these Japanese ships will have 'RESEARCH' painted along its side. The crewmen will often times hold up large signs to helicopters flying over head that explain to the viewer that they are, 'collecting tissue samples.' (See photo below.)

The Japanese 'researchers' seem to learn more about a whale when it is dead then observing it when it is alive.

But they are not fooling anyone.

Two years ago, a veteran Japanese whaler (not 

named) was frightened by what he knew; his fellow crewmen were receiving boxes of whale meat, purposely mislabelled as personal belongings, at their homes after they returned from their Antarctic hunts. The whaler then contacted Greenpeace activists Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki and told them what he had experienced.
In 2008, the two activists (pictured below) stole a 50 lb box of whale meat labelled 'cardboard and vinyl' to prove the embezzlement of the state run research program. They then handed the box over to prosecutors and called in a press conference to publicise what they saw as evidence of corruption.
But officials explained the crew members were receiving boxes of whale meat as 'souvenirs'.

On June 20, police arrested Sato and Suzuki and raided Greenpeace's Tokyo office while the charges of embezzlement against the state were being dropped. Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were detained and held for 26 days. The two activists were strapped to chairs and interrogated up three times a day without their lawyers present, Greenpeace says.
"Activists are not criminals and to treat them as such has a chilling effect in society, undermining the quality of democracy," Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo had said.

The two men, nicknamed the Tokyo Two, were each sentenced to serve a year in jail.

Sato states: "The verdict is unfair in that it violates our rights to let people know, and the people's right to know." Whales Ahoy

Photo credit: Greenpeace.org