Victory: Japan pouts, threatens to leave, fails to harpoon whale body

Well, well, well. Japan failed to seize the major­i­ty at the Inter­na­tion­al Whal­ing Com­mis­sion for at least one more year. No secret bal­lots. No scup­per­ing the South­ern Ocean Whale Sanc­tu­ary. No kick­ing Green­peace out. And, pre­dictably, the Guardian reports the usu­al sour grapes threat: “Japan threat­ens to leave IWC”
There are 255 hits on Google for the phrase [“Japan Threat­ens to leave” + IWC] some dat­ing back to 1999. They drag out the same damn press release every time they lose, claim­ing that the IWC has been hijacked by con­ser­va­tion inter­ests and no longer appears inter­est­ed in the real busi­ness of respon­si­ble, sus­tain­able whale resource man­age­ment mak­ing some Yen off of the killing of whales.

Next year may be dif­fer­ent. The anti-whal­ing forces are going to have to work pret­ty hard to widen that 3-vote gap between an IWC that sides with right-think­ing whale pro­tec­tors world­wide, and an IWC that endors­es whole­sale slaugh­ter.

The car­toon above was part of a New York­er cap­tion con­test a cou­ple weeks back. The wonky in-joke cap­tion I’d scrib­ble today: “I don’t think the insur­ance will cov­er the dam­age, dear. But we could always apply for Japan­ese Fish­eries Aid.”