Wildlife

Japan's Whaling on Trial in the World Court

Japan told the UN's top court that Australia's anti-whaling case is part of a "civilizing mission and moral crusade" that is totally out of place in the modern world.

Australian government lawyers argued in the world court that Japan’s annual whale hunt is nothing more than commercial slaughter of the marine mammals under the guise of science.

Australia’s case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague is countered by Japan’s claims that its hunts are legal under a 1946 convention that allows limited catches for scientific research.

But Australia argues that killing whales for research “only makes sense if there is a question that needs to be answered ... a meaningful question.”

They say that Japan is merely enabling its whaling fleet to kill for the purpose of putting whale meat on Japanese dinner plates.

“What you have before you is not a scientific research program. It is a heap of body parts taken from a pile of dead whales," Australian lawyer Phillippe Sands told the court.

Commercial whaling was halted in 1986 under an international moratorium.

But Japan, Iceland and Norway have continued to conduct limited whaling expeditions despite a demonstrated lack of demand in the marketplace for the meat of the slaughtered leviathans.

Australian officials say they want the court to deliver a judgment by the end of the year, before Japan launches its annual Southern Hemisphere hunt near Antarctica.

Australia has declared a vast stretch of the Southern Ocean under its jurisdiction a whale sanctuary.

Bugless Britain Leaving U.K. Birds Hungry This Summer

A second consecutive wet, cool and unsettled summer across Britain has wiped out large populations of bees, moths and butterflies, according to a new National Trust report. It warns that the drop in the number of winged insects could cause birds and bats go to hungry for the remainder of this year.

“Insect populations have been really very low. Then when they have got going, they’ve been hit by a spell of cool, windy weather... so our environment is just not bouncing with butterflies or anything else,”said Matthew Oates, a National Trust naturalist who worked on the report.

It says that the dearth of airborne insects could cause martins, swifts, swallows and warblers to struggle to survive in the coming months.

A delayed spring that started with the coldest March in 50 years across the U.K. caused frogs and toads to struggle to breed in water that was still frozen in many rural locations.