Green Daily

Green Daily: Thank you for this opportunity, it's an honor to speak with you. With the recent debut of Whale Wars on Animal Planet, many of our readers may have had a chance to get a taste of what it is you do, and what we can look forward to in future episodes of the show. Can you tell us a bit about your take on the show?

Captain Watson: Well sure. What Whale Wars does is give millions of people the opportunity to come with us to one of the most hostile and remote areas in the planet, and see what we do to protect whales. For the most part, whaling is out of sight, out of mind. Many people aren't even aware that it's still going on. So I think that's the most important thing, the educational value of this to make people aware and also to show that something's being done about it.

"I don't like protesting, it's such a submissive sort of thing, you know? It's like please, please, please don't kill the whales, but of course they do it anyway"

Tell us a bit about how Animal Planet got involved with this.

A couple of years ago we were looking at the idea of this type of show, and we actually went around to a few different networks about it, and Animal Planet was the one that was interested. My idea was that Discovery has Deadliest Catch, where it's really a bunch of guys in boats in very rough waters catching crabs. So I said, well, we can give you men and women in boats in very, very rough waters, saving whales. Then there's the added bonus of icebergs and penguins and confrontations.

Tell us a bit about how you got started in all of this, especially with your organization, Sea Shepherd.

Oh, that goes way back. I actually started when I was 10 years old, protecting beavers in eastern Canada, sabotaging trap lines and releasing beavers from traps. Then I was the youngest founding member of Greenpeace at 18 years old. I left Greenpeace in 1977 to establish Sea Shepherd because I wanted an organization that would intervene against illegal activities. I don't like protesting, it's such a submissive sort of thing, you know? It's like please, please, please don't kill the whales, but of course they do it anyway. So that's why I set up Sea Shepherd as a unique organization, because we're not a protest organization, we intervene. We use the United Nations World Charter for nature as our guideline, because it allows non-government organizations to uphold international conservation law.

In the first episode of Whale Wars, we got to see some "bad blood" between you and Greenpeace. Would you like to talk at all about that?

Greenpeace has been going down there, and we've been going down there, and we've been trying to cooperate with them for years. In fact we do cooperate with them, as everytime we find a whaling fleet, we give Greenpeace the coordinates so that they can find them too. But they won't reciprocate, they won't return the favor. They're constantly denouncing us for our tactics, even though we've never injured anybody, or been convicted of a crime.

Now, I'm actually really upset with Greenpeace, because this year they've been raising money for ten months and millions of dollars to go down and protect whales again, and then two weeks before the Japanese fleet departs, they announced they're not going down again. It also coincided with Japan announcing that they're sending a gunboat down this year, so I think they got scared off. But if you're going to collect money to save whales, then you should do it. When I say we're going to go out and save whales, this isn't a slogan for us; we mean it.

What can we expect in the future of Whale Wars?

Well first of all, I should say that the campaign was an incredible success. Out of the quota of 50 Humpbacks, they took zero. Out of the quota of Fin Whales, they took zero, and their quote of 935 Minki Whales, they took only about half. So we cost them about $70 million, and they only got about half of their quota from the year before. We hit them pretty hard, and if we keep this sort of pressure on them, I'm pretty sure we can shut them down.

We have to develop tactics that aren't going to injure anybody, but at the same time are imaginative and humorous. So that's why we launch what I call the first non-toxic, organic, bio-degradable form of chemical warfare ever when we attack them with rotten butter and methyl cellulose, which are both food-grade products, although butyric acid stinks like you wouldn't believe. But the whole objective was to make the ship so stinky and so slippery that nobody could work on them.

Then also to draw attention, and put the Japanese on the spot, on the day that the Australian Federal Court ordered the Japanese to not kill whales in the Australian Antarctic territory -- when they went ahead and did anyway -- we boarded one of the harpoon boats, I put two people on board knowing exactly what the Japanese would do, and they held them for three days. That allowed us to break into the Japanese media, which hadn't been done before. They actually sent me a ransom note, saying, "Look, we'll release your people, but you have to do this, this and this, " which gave me an incredible opening to say that I don't do business with terrorists.

Anyway, what happened was the Australian government was forced to intervene, because I knew that there was no way that the Australian government was going to allow the Japanese to pick up an Australian citizen in the Australian Antarctic territory and bring them back to Japan under arrest. So they had to intervene, they did, and my guys were released.

What we kept doing after that was chasing them. We chased them for 21,000 miles over that period of time, and they kept moving and moving. The thing is, while we're chasing them, they can't whale. One of the things I always say is since I left Greenpeace in 1977, I haven't seen a whale die. When we show up, the killing stops.

One of the criticisms that I always found kind of amusing is when people say that Greenpeace has all this incredible footage of whales being killed, and you don't have any. I say, "Yeah, we don't make snuff flicks. We're there to save whales, not to film them dying."

"When I say we're going to go out and save whales, this isn't a slogan for us; we mean it. "

In closing, was there anything else you wanted to add about Whale Wars, or Sea Shepherd in general?

Over the weekend, we got about 80% positive comments and about 20% negative. Most of the negative ones were the usual: people don't like what we do or how we do it. But one of the things that people did point out was why we have such an inexperienced crew, and there's good reason for that. We give people the opportunity to get involved and to learn. Also, the kind of passion that these people have is not the kind of passion I'm going to get out of professional sailors. These are people who really want to save whales, and they learned as they go along. People say this is irresponsible or people get hurt, but the fact is that our record speaks for itself. In 31 years, we've never had any serious injuries, and we've never injured anybody.

In the part where the boat was overturned and they say people could have died, you know, we were prepared for that because every one of those people was wearing a wetsuit under a Mustang survival suit, so they were good in that water for 20 minutes, anyway.

Thank you so much for your time, we appreciate the interview and everything you're doing.