Crocodile Hunter’s Widow Joins Anti-Whaling Bandwagon

The widow of famous Australian “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, has started taking an active role in the movement against Japanese whaling:

“Crocodile hunter” Steve Irwin’s family plans a campaign against Japanese whaling to show that scientific data about whales can be obtained without killing them, the Australian’s widow said Thursday.

Terri Irwin said the project would be launched in 2008 through a whale watching business she bought after her husband’s death last year.

“We can actually learn everything the Japanese are learning with lethal research by using non-lethal research,” she told Channel Nine television.

“That’s what I’m embarking on in 2008. We are determined to show the Japanese they can stop all whaling, not just humpbacks,” she added.

The research is to be carried out in the southern hemisphere in cooperation with Oregon State University, she said.

Japan has been under fire for defying international protests and sending its whaling fleet into Antarctic waters to hunt around 1,000 whales, ostensibly for “scientific” purposes, exploiting a loophole in a 1986 moratorium on whaling.

As you can see from the photo in the post, radical animal rights activist Paul Watson‘s Sea Shepherd organization has changed the name of one of their ships to the “Steve Irwin” (a smiling Terri Irwin standing next to Watson and the ship suggests that this was done with her approval). Watson has vowed to continue his campaign to disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet, no doubt using the same tactics of ship ramming and violence that have led some to call Sea Shepherd an eco-terrorist organization.

Update: For more information on Sea Shephard and Watson, check out this November 2007 article from the New Yorker. Unlike most western media outlets, it actually includes information about Sea Shepherd’s non-Japanese opponents:

Sidney Holt, one of the principal architects of the whaling moratorium, told me, “I think his involvement in all this is an absolute disaster. Almost everything he has been doing has had blowback for those who want to see an end to whaling. In too many cases, playing piracy on the ocean, and creating danger for other ships, is simply not liked.”