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Dolphin in Brazil helping with fishing illustration

Dolphins and fishermen working together

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Gray whale (eschrichtius robustus) Gray whale in Ojo de liebre lagoon Baja California.

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Dolphins with keepers in the new Windsor Safari Park. Image: PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo

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Fishers' involvement is crucial. Image: WDC/JTF

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Whale evolution cover

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Fishers chatting

Scottish fishers working with us to reduce risks to whales

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tins of whale meat

How Japan’s whaling industry is trying to convince people to eat whales

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Selling snake oil is a tradition

When Marie Curie was being feited for her two nobel prizes, there were plenty of charlatans who were ready to leap upon her work to sell the latest ‘snake oil’ curative.

Radium drinking solution bottleThe number of medicines that suddenly appeared in the early 1900s based on radium and other similar products was both amazing and scary. What damage was done to whole populations in the 1900s was only overshadowed by the First World War.

But it seems the charlatans are not confiend to history. Now, faced with an ever increasing mountain of whale meat that they cannot sell (apart from to dogs), it appears that the Japanese Government are claiming whale meat is a ‘health product’. 

Japan’s Institute of Cetaean Research (ICR), which is a front for the Japanese commercial whaling industry, has launched a new campaign to promote whale meat as a nutritious food that ‘enhances physical strength and reduces fatigue.’

Australia’s ABC reports that “With about 5,000 tonnes of whale meat sitting unwanted in freezers around Japan, the country’s Institute for Cetacean Research has decided to launch a new campaign to promote the by-product of its so-called scientific whaling program.

Once popular in school lunches, younger generations of Japanese rarely, if ever, eat whale.”

WDC warned in our publication ‘Reinventing the Whale’ that the whalers, increasingly desperate to keep their dying industry alive would revert to claiming that they had the new ‘snake oil’. Lets just hope the Japanese public don’t fall for this one as the public did for Radium in the 1900s.