Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is featured in two major magazines in the United States for the month of May.

There is Peter Heller's excellent article titled The Whale Warriors: Whaling in the Antarctic Seas in the May edition of National Geographic Adventurecovering our campaign to the Southern Oceans of Antarctica to oppose illegal Japanese whaling.

Outside magazine takes their story all the way back to the top of the globe in a feature story on Norwegian whaling entitled Bloody Business by Philip Armour.

Excerpts referring to Sea Shepherd in the Outside magazine article are:

Page 86: Many governments and private environmental groups - most notably Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society - want the big industrial nations to stop.

Page 87: Iceland resumed whaling in 2003 as well, but whereas Norway and Iceland hunt within their own borders, Japanese whalers still work in International waters, and that means its six-vessel "research" fleet is subject to serious high-seas interference. Last December and January, boats from Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd caused weeks of mayhem for the Japanese fleet in the Southern Oceans, with Greenpeace members acting as human shields, trying to thwart the whalers and Sea Shepherd's captain  Paul Watson, using his ship Farley Mowat as a floating weapon, to sideswipe the hulls of Japanese boats.

Page 104: The number crunching doesn't mean Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd have become nothing more than accountants: Their opposition is still driven by a strong conviction that whales have an inherent right to swim free. In January, via satellite phone, I would talk to activists aboard the Greenpeace ship Esperanza and the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat during their clashes with the Japanese whaling fleet.

Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson 55 - who in 1992 sabotaged a whaleboat docked in the Lofoten Islands - uses similar rhetoric. "To me, intelligence is the ability to live in harmony with nature and to survive within ecosystems, "he says. "Whales do this, but we are fouling our own nest. Who's more intelligent?"

The article is a welcome look into the workings of a Norwegian whaling boat.

Philip writes:

It's painful to watch it die, and I'm not one usually sanctimonious about mankind's carnivorous ways. I can't be: My ancestor and namesake was Philip D. Armour, the 19th Century Chicago meatpacker whose infamous factories inspired Upton Sinclair to write The Jungle. Still there is no denying it: A dying whale grabs my heart like nothing else can.

Philip article also backs up our position that the slaughter of whales is inhumane. Again he writes:

The only unknown in this process is how quickly the whales perish. Earlier in the trip, Skarheim has assured me that the exploding grenade, "knocks the whales unconscious, and they die almost immediately from shock and blood loss."

That was true with the first whale, but the next four whales suffer a great deal. The harpoons hit muscle, and appear to drive the whale mad with pain and fear. One of them shoots out of the water and writhes like a marlin on a hook.

The cruelty of the whales is revealed:

In a celebratory mood, Karlsen cuts off the dead male's penis and hold the two foot long organ up to his chest. "It makes a damn nice tie," he jokes.

The article ends with a whaler rubbing his sore arms and boasts that he is tired and his arms so sore from flensing the whale that they are useless for anything. "Yup," a whaler says, "it costs a lot to be a man."

It cost the whales one hell of a lot more for these barbaric whale castrators to flaunt their pseudo-masculinity like crazed Vikings.

This is a valuable article and well-worth reading especially in light of the fact that Norway has now raised their illegal self-set quota to over 1,000 piked (minke) whales for 2006.