The Cove

I just watched “The Cove” and it is a brilliant documentary. After it was over, I felt predictably depressed. Ignorant arseholes using culture as an excuse to practice outdated, barbaric practices on beautiful, intelligent, sentient marine mammals and then blatantly lying about what they are doing before feeding toxic meat to school children. Not really too much to be happy about there. But the more I thought about it the more I realized there is reason to celebrate...

The tide is turning, the global success of this movie, culminating at the Oscars, has led to a huge audience, all informed and outraged. The butchers find themselves more isolated and more marginalised on a daily basis – That is a result!

Meanwhile in the Southern Ocean, Sea Shepherd have just concluded their most successful season ever. They shut down the Japanese whaling fleet for over half of it’s season, cutting their kill quote drastically and costing the Japanese tax payer millions of dollars in subsidies. The success of Whale Wars on Discovery Channel has brought extra awareness and with that extra funding for the campaign, increase the number of boats and the chance of success. That awareness has also, finally, forced vote hungry Australian politicians to stand by election pledges and complain openly about the poachers in their waters. Meanwhile the whalers are forced in to more and more desperate measures like, secruity ships, acosutic weapons and running over small boats as the World watches, intrigued, bemused and appalled – That is a result!

Last year the EU banned the import of Canadian seal products so that the butchers of Newfoundland have one less market for their grizzly kill – That is a result!

Today in the UK a hunt observer was cleared of wrong doing in association with the death of a thug who was threatening him and trying to stop his gyrocopter taking off to observe a fox hunt. I don’t celebrate the death of a member of the pro-hunt lobby, frankly I don’t care if he lives or dies, but what was interesting was that a high proportion of comments in the Times Online supported the verdict. I was surprised at that, I thought the right wing readers would be outraged. This perhaps illustrates that the debate has moved on. People are no longer able to hide behind the veil of calling it a class struggle and are seeing it for what it actually is. A law to stop barbaric ritual slaughter for entertainment - That is a result

The world is slowly changing. These changes are made possible by the availability of information, through TV, movies and the internet. The majority of people are intelligent, compassionate and caring. They don’t support this pointless, outdated barbarism and will take a stand. Society is becoming progressively more aware of its power to control nature and th efact that with intelligence and power comes responsibility. Just as slavery was abolished, just as child labour was outlawed so these unnecessary, barbaric acts will eventually be stopped by collective World opinion. Culture is a piss-poor excuse for brutality and slowly but surely we are winning this fight - That is a result!