Human follies. Icelandic whalers are killing endangered fin whales to ship their meat to Japan, where it is turned into luxurious dog food. It is Michinoku Farm, a Tokyo-based company, that offers "low-calorie, low-fat, high-protein," but cetacean-based pet food, as the product description on its company website reads.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Human follies. The Icelandic whalers are killing endangered fin whales to ship their meats to Japan, where they are processed into luxurious dog food. Michinoku Farm, a Tokyo-based company, has marketed pet food that is "low-calorie, low-fat, high-protein", but based on cetaceans, as the product description on its corporate website reads.
Michinoku, which also advertises other "fantastic goodies" made with meat from Mongolian horses and kangaroos, has three different sized packets of whale bites, with a 60-gram sachet sold for 609 yen (about $ 6.28) or a 500-gram sachet for 3,780 yen. The goal is to provide the richest Japanese people "Something different" like food for their animals. The alarm was raised by the Japanese environmental group Ikan, together with three other local NGOs.
“The product description identifies the meat as a fin whale of Icelandic origin. Its use in pet food suggest that new markets are being studied. And if Iceland prepares to hunt over 180 fin whales in 2013 for this export market, we want to question the environmental and economic logic of using meat from an endangered species for the manufacture of dog products ", explains a note from environmental associations.
And the appeal hit the mark: the President of Michinoku, Takuma Konno, said just this morning that he had decided to collect the product, even though its sale is legal in Japan. “Dogs are like family members for many people in Japan. We just wanted to sell a great variety of dog food ", he said to the AFP news agency, adding: “Maybe I was oblivious to the whaling debate, but the product is not worth selling if it risks making someone angry ".
Meanwhile the whales continue to die, with Japan that hunts them with the subterfuge of research and Iceland openly challenging the international ban. "Despite increasing threats and a moratorium on commercial hunting has been in place since 1986, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a body set up to protect cetacean populations, it has not yet been able to stop the whaling nations“, Explains Greenpeace, in reference to Norway, Iceland and Japan continue to hunt. but the statistics speak for themselves: blue whales in Antarctica, for example, are 1 percent of the original population.
Roberta Ragni
- Grindadráp: whaling in the Faroe Islands (video of the massacre)
