Whale Wars

The funniest show on TV right now has got to be “Whale Wars.” This Animal Planet show is about a group of people called “The Sea Shepherds” who make an annual trek to the Antarctic to try to stop Japanese whalers. The Japanese claim that their whaling is legally accepted research, which Sea Shepherd and others contend is a cover for banned commercial whaling. Sea Shepherd has been both criticized and praised for tactics of direct action sabotage which include throwing stink bombs of butyric acid as well as ramming, boarding, and otherwise attempting to disable the Japanese vessels.

The funny part of the show is that the Sea Shepherds are completely incompetent. Every thing they try fails, and they are constantly making bone-headed decisions. Their “Captain” Paul Watson looks like he just came out of the local Chuck-E-Cheese. The rest of the crew is just as bad. They make comments like “I would give my life to save just one whale.” Saving whales is great and all, but personally I value human life over animal life any day. Especially MY own life.

Let me just say that I personally do not have a problem with the sentiments of The Sea Shepherds (to an extent), but their tactics are ridiculous. They basically travel down into the Southern Ocean and try to find the Japanese whaling fleet. If and when they find the fleet, they try to get alongside the whalers and they throw stink bombs at them. The idea is that if they throw stink bombs the whalers won’t be able to work due to the smell. Also the butyric acid in the stink bombs can contaminate the whale meat.

This notion is seemingly a noble way to fight the whalers, but it doesn’t work. The idea is that they Sea Shepherds don’t want to harm the Japanese whalers physically, but only want to deter them from being able to work. Often times the Sea Shepherds will release a smaller inflatable boat from their main vessel. The idea here is that the smaller boat is faster, and can catch the speedy Japanese boats. In one particularly comical episode, the Sea Shepherds tried to lower the inflatable into the water…with people in it...while going full speed. Needless to say, they ended up flipping the inflatable boat and spilling four crewmembers into the frigid Southern Ocean. On a different occasion, they again tried to launch the small inflatable vessel. This time they were “successful” in the launch, but the driver of the inflatable then proceeded to chase after the whalers…in the wrong direction. They raced about 5 miles in the opposite direction of the whalers until they realized what happened. Another time they were trying to throw stink bombs onto the whalers boat, one of their crewmembers accidentally dropped one of the glass bottles…thus stink bombing their own boat! It was quite humorous to see them all scurrying to get inside.

Again, I’m not here to say that killing whales is a good thing. I think that unnecessarily killing endangered animals is wrong. However, the stupidity of the Sea Shepherds is just too amusing to overlook. Every episode is a new chance for them to somehow screw it all up.