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Japan Whale Hunters Head Out To Sea

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By HIROKO TABUCHI, The Associated Press

Published: November 19, 2007

SHIMONOSEKI, Japan - A defiant Japan embarked on its largest whaling expedition in decades Sunday, targeting protected humpbacks for the first time since the 1960s despite international opposition. An anti-whaling protest boat awaited the fleet offshore.

Bid farewell in a festive ceremony in the southern port of Shimonoseki, four ships headed for the waters off Antarctica, resuming a hunt that was cut short by a deadly fire in February that crippled the fleet's mother ship.

The whalers plan to kill up to 50 humpbacks in what is thought to be the first large-scale hunt for the once nearly extinct species since a 1963 moratorium in the Southern Pacific put the giant marine mammals under international protection.

The mission also aims to take as many as 935 minke whales and up to 50 fin whales in what Japan's Fisheries Agency says is its largest-ever scientific whale hunt. The expedition lasts through April.

Japan says it needs to kill the animals to conduct research on their reproductive and feeding patterns.

While scientific whale hunts are allowed by the International Whaling Commission, or IWC, critics say Japan is using science as a cover for commercial whaling.

The anti-whaling group Greenpeace said its protest ship, Esperanza, was moored just outside Japan's territorial waters and would chase the fleet to the southern ocean. There was no immediate word Sunday of an offshore confrontation.

Humpbacks feed, mate and give birth near shore, making them easy prey for whalers, who by some estimates depleted the global population to just 1,200 before the 1963 moratorium. The southern moratorium was followed by a worldwide ban in 1966.

Since then, only Greenland and the Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have been allowed to catch humpbacks under an IWC aboriginal subsistence program. Each caught one humpback last year, according to the commission.

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