Captain Paul Watson: We don’t solicit support. People come to us because they hear about us and they like what we do. The best way to support Sea Shepherd is to visit the website at www.Seashepherd.org and sign up as a monthly donor to help us get our ships into positions where we can make a difference.
JM: According to your biography, you experienced a powerful epiphany during a 1975 confrontation with Soviet whalers when you looked into the eye of a dying whale. Please give us the particulars on the incident and its profound impact upon your life.
Captain Paul Watson: It was in June 1975 during the first Greenpeace whale campaign. Our strategy was to place ourselves in a small boat between the whales and the whalers using the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence. Robert Hunter and I were the first to place our bodies on the line and we succeeded in blocking the harpooner for about 20 minutes until the captain of the whaler ran down the catwalk and yelled into the harpooner’s ear and then turned to us and smiled and brought his finger across his throat. That’s when I realized that Gandhi was not going to work for us that day. A few minutes later the harpoon cannon thundered and the harpoon flew over our head and slammed into the backside of one of eight magnificent Sperm whales that were fleeing for their lives. It was a female and she screamed and then suddenly the large male struck the water with his tail and tail and disappeared. We thought it would attack us but instead the whale swam underneath of us and erupted from the sea behind us and hurtled himself at the harpooner on the Soviet vessel. But the harpooner was ready for this and had already loaded an unattached harpoon into the gun. He pulled the trigger and hit the whale at point blank range in the head. The large bull screamed and fell back in the water in a spreading pool of its own hot blood. And as the whale struggled in agony on the surface, rolling and thrashing, I caught his eye and he saw me. Suddenly I saw a trail of bloody bubbles coming swiftly towards us and the whale rose up out of the sea at an angle directly beside us and was about to fall upon our small fragile inflatable boat. And I looked up into that eye, an eye the size of my fist and what I saw there changed my life forever – I saw understanding, I saw awareness. That whale knew what we were doing and with a great effort pulled himself back and sank into the sea and I saw his eye disappear below the surface and he died. He could have taken our lives but in his last moments he spared us and thus I am indebted to that whale for my life.
And I saw something else in that eye – it was pity and not for himself but for us – that we could kill so thoughtlessly and so mercilessly and I realized that the reason the Soviets were killing Sperm whales was for spermaceti oil used for lubricating machinery and one of the uses was in the construction on inter-continental ballistic missiles for the purpose of exterminating mass numbers of human beings and that is when it struck me that we, the human species are insane. So from that day on I have chosen to serve whalekind and the species in the sea – they are our clients – not people.
JM: In your opinion, why do so many in the environmental and animal liberation movements reject the use of direct action as a legitimate and necessary tool to confront the violent war commercial interests, corporations, consumerism, and capitalism are waging against the Earth and most of its non-human animal inhabitants?
Captain Paul Watson: We are conditioned to respond in socially acceptable ways i.e. protests, petitions boycotts etc. We also have the problem that nature and other species are an abstraction to us. Humans fight for property, for immediate self defense and for religion. Hominids are a self centered species. When people ask how I can risk human life to protect a whale, I cite the fact that we do not think it is unnatural or unethical to risk our lives and to kill over property like land and oil. And we accept dying and killing for ridiculous religious beliefs. I think fighting for endangered species and threatened habitats to be much nobler.
JM: The United States government has labeled groups like the Animal Liberation Front as “top domestic terrorist threats” and “eco-terrorists.” What do you think of this?
Captain Paul Watson: These groups are indeed a threat to the dominant paradigm. They question the values that our society holds, the same values that are destroying this planet. From their point of view, this is a more fundamental threat than political or religious terrorism which they understand. After all governments themselves practice religious and political terrorism.
JM: Have you been accused of “terrorism?”
Captain Paul Watson: Many times, all the time. Yet for some strange reason I get to continue to fly on airplanes, I have no problems traveling and no warrants out for my arrest. It’s easy to call someone a terrorist. It’s a word used often these days to attack anyone someone disagrees with. Just questioning the war, or the destruction of the planet makes one a terrorist these days. I have never injured anyone. I’ve never been convicted of a crime. I’ve never been sued. I make for a pretty lousy terrorist.
JM: How many ships sail under Sea Shepherd’s flag?
Captain Paul Watson: Three. The Steve Irwin presently in Australia. The Sirenian, presently in the Galapagos and the Farley Mowat, presently in Eastern Canada.
JM: How many whales would you estimate Sea Shepherd (as an organization) has saved?
Captain Paul Watson: That is difficult to say but certainly it is in the thousands. We shut down every pirate whaler in the North Atlantic in 1979 and 1980 and we cut the Japanese quotas in half for the last two years and that represents about a thousand whales alone.
JM: When your ship encounters a whaling vessel, what tactics do you use to prevent them from killing one (or more) of those magnificent creatures?
Captain Paul Watson: The Dalai Lama gave me a small statue back in 1987 called Hayagriva. He told me it represents the compassionate aspect of Buddha’s wrath. In other words you never want to hurt anyone but when they cannot see enlightenment, you scare the hell out of them until they do. We intimidate them. We attack them with stink bombs and guns that shoot pie filling. We keep them running and if they are running they can’t kill whales. I have not seen a whale die since I left Greenpeace back in 1977.
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