Activism
Sea Shepherd engages in conventional protests and direct actions to protect marine wildlife. Sea Shepherd operations have included interdiction against commercial fishing, shark poaching and finning, seal hunting, and whaling. The group has been active in intervening against fishing and poaching in the South Pacific, the Mediterranean, and in waters around the Galapagos Islands.
According to its mission statement, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society "uses innovative direct-action tactics to investigate, document, and take action when necessary to expose and confront illegal activities on the high seas". Those actions have included scuttling and disabling commercial whaling vessels at harbor, ramming other vessels, throwing glass bottles of butyric acid on the decks of vessels at sea, boarding of whaling vessels while at sea, and seizure and destruction of drift nets at sea. As of 2009, Paul Watson has said that the organization has sunk ten whaling ships while also destroying millions of dollars worth of equipment. Their practice of attacking and sinking other ships has led to reports of injuries to other sailors as well as the Sea Shepherd crew, including concussions and complications from chemical attacks.
Watson considers the actions of Sea Shepherd to be against criminal operations and has called the group an anti-poaching organization. Critics claim that Sea Shepherd's actions constitute violations of international law, while Watson has stated that Sea Shepherd believes that their actions constitute an attempt to enforce international conservation laws and international maritime law under the World Charter for Nature adopted by the United Nations . Australia has declared Japan's hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary to be illegal, and federal court judge Jim Allsop has stated "there is no practical mechanism by which orders of this court can be enforced." The lack of official enforcement mechanisms in that law prompted the Society to adopt, without official sanction, what it sees as a law enforcement mission. A 2008 academic paper by researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria concluded that the group "may be best categorized as a vigilante group, because they say they are seeking to enforce a legal status quo because of states' and the international community's inabilities or unwillingness to do so."
Watson left Greenpeace in 1977 after being expelled from the board of directors due to his confrontational methods. Since then, Greenpeace has criticized Sea Shepherd for the group's tactics, particularly regarding its interaction with whaling ships while at sea. The rival environmental group maintains Sea Shepherd is a violent organization whose tactics may endanger the lives of fishermen and whalers. Greenpeace has called Watson a violent extremist and will no longer comment on his activities. Greenpeace is also critical of the group on its website and state: "By making it easy to paint anti-whaling forces as dangerous, piratical terrorists, Sea Shepherd could undermine the forces within Japan which could actually bring whaling to an end". Both groups protest the Japanese whale hunts in the Southern Ocean but Greenpeace has a policy to not assist Sea Shepherd in finding the whalers. In his 2009 book, Whaling in Japan, Jun Morikawa states that Sea Shepherd's confrontational tactics have actually strengthened Japan's resolve to continue with its whaling program. According to Morikawa, Sea Shepherd's activities against Japan's whaling ships have allowed the Japanese government to rally domestic support for the program from Japanese who were otherwise ambivalent about the practice of hunting and eating whales.
Sea Shepherd has been criticized and sometimes physically attacked by people in several of the countries they protest against. In March 1995, a mob of Canadian seal hunters stormed the hotel where members were staying. They fled while the mob ransacked their room. In November 1998, Makah seized an inflatable boat belonging to the group and threw rocks at the Sea Shepherd's Sirenian in response to protests over their whale hunt.In 2005, 11 Sea Shepherd crew were involved in an altercation with sealers while on the ice. The sealers were not charged with any crime, but the activists were arrested and later convicted for approaching too close to the hunt. In 2008, fishermen in the French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon cut the mooring lines of the Farley Mowat after hearing Watson make disparaging comments about the deaths of four seal hunters. In February 2010, pro-whaling demonstrators gathered outside the Australian Embassy in Tokyo to protest the group. A political activist said that Sea Shepherd's actions were "absolutely racial discrimination against Japanese people." In response, Sea Shepherd stated that they also oppose whaling in the Faroe Islands, sealing in Canada, etc. In response to the events of the sinking of the Ady Gil in January 2010, Glenn Inwood, whose firm handles public relations on behalf of the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, accused Sea Shepherd of being "hostile eco-terrorists".
Read more about this topic: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society