Entries by Chris Butler-Stroud

So the Conneyland dolphins died because of an opiate overdose, that some idiot gave them during a rave. 'Zoo dolphins deaths 'Caused by Party Drugs'

We need to ask why the dolphinarium ever allowed the rave to take place so close to the dolphins in the first place?

The dolphin captive display industry tell us that dolphins are held so we can learn more about conservation, but maybe all that we learn is how to squeeze more money out of these amazing creatures.

Whales and dolphins are highly intelligent animals who need to live in complex social groups. In captivity they will usually have been separated from their families, sometimes being captured in cruel hunts. A concrete tank can never replace their ocean home or their families.

We have no right to put these amazing creatures in captivity. Captive whale and dolphin shows are not educational, nor are they ‘conservation’.

As this case proves, the dolphin display industry is about making money out of these creatures – but it’s often the dolphins that pay the ultimate price.

The Guardian is reporting that the 'UK vowed to hold firm against plans to continue the wasteful practice of throwing away edible fish at sea, at a meeting in Brussels on Monday. France and Spain have written a "joint declaration" to be discussed at today's all-day meeting of fisheries ministers in Brussels, the Guardian revealed last week, which if adopted would mean the proposed ban on discarding healthy fish at sea would be lost.'

WDCS takes it's hat off to the UK Minister, Richard Benyon MP, for fighting to conserve fish.

Meanwhile the UK's Chancellor has appeared to have declared war on the rest of our wildlife.

In April 2011, the UK Government’s Cabinet Office launched its ‘Red Tape Challenge’. This means, the Government publishes regulations online every few weeks according to a specific theme. They are asking the public for comments on the impacts of regulations and possible improvements. The Red Tape Challenge website states that ‘the default presumption will be that burdensome regulations will go. If Ministers want to keep them, they have to make a very good case for them to stay.’ This means, unless there is a positive position taken by the public and Ministers, the regulation should be scrapped.

What appears to be a positive method of public consultation could, however, be turning into a nightmare for nature and biodiversity conservation, as well as a method for Government to avoid its own declared aims on climate change.

Throughout the process the Government publishes the general regulations that cross all sectors. These six cross-cutting themes (Equalities, Environment, Employment Related Law, Company and Commercial Law, Pensions) will be open for comment throughout the Red Tape Challenge process, but every few weeks the Government publishes the regulations affecting one specific sector or industry. For each of these there will be a ‘spotlight’ window for users to submit views. Interested businesses, individuals and organisations are asked to comment on which regulations could be improved or redesigned, which should be got rid of, or which should be kept.

The regulations under the Environment Theme aim to promote sustainable development and protect the environment. There are 278 regulations that relate to the environment, for ease of commenting, the Government has broken them into the following seven areas:

• Air quality


• Biodiversity, wildlife management, landscape, countryside and recreation


• Energy labelling and sustainable products


• Industrial emissions and carbon reductions


• Noise and nuisance


• Waste


• Environmental permits, information and damage

The regulations under the Biodiversity, wildlife management, landscape, countryside and recreation area for example aim to conserve vulnerable or rare species, habitats and wildlife sites. They also control access to footpaths and national parks.

They include provisions on fishing activities; invasive non-native species; protection of native species; traps; trade in endangered species; zoo licensing; dangerous wild animals; game; selling dead wild birds; registering and ringing captive birds; wildfowling restrictions; national park authorities; common land; rights of way; areas of outstanding beauty; and pest control.

You can find all 163 regulations that relate to biodiversity, wildlife management, landscape, countryside and recreation on the left here.

The Government wants to hear the public’s views on how they could reduce regulatory burdens, and improve implementation of these regulations; to ensure that they can deliver their policy aims and protect the environment in the most effective way. They specifically want to know:

• Should they be scrapped altogether?


• Could their purpose be achieved in a non-regulatory way (eg through a voluntary code?) How?


• Could they be reformed, simplified or merged? How?


• Can their bureaucracy be reduced through better implementation? How?


• Can their enforcement be made less burdensome? How?


• Should they be left as they are?

WDCS wants to make sure that the Government takes their duties to protect the environment and species within seriously and therefore, we ask you to visit the above websites and submit a comment urging the government to safeguard the future of our vital environmental legislation. It only takes two minutes. Without it our wildlife and special places will be at the mercy of unrestrained human activity and ever more severe climate change.

Scraping them would also make a mockery of the Coalition Government's ambitions to be the ‘greenest government ever’.

Here are some particular points that you could raise:

• Regulations designed to conserve species and protect the natural environment are of great importance and should not be removed;


• We need more and better protection for wildlife and habitats, not less, specifically ‘recklessness’ needs to be reinstated into the Habitats Regulations and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, to make it an offence again to deliberately or ‘recklessly’ capture, kill, disturb, or trade in an animal of European protected species which includes all dolphins, whales and porpoises;


• Urgent measures are required to prevent disturbance, protect breeding and resting places, control noise, and ensure cross-sectoral planning and zoning of activities and this will require a better legal definition of ‘disturbance’;


• A definition of ‘breeding and resting places’ is required for mobile marine species within the Habitats Regulations;


• Changes are also required within the Habitats Regulations to allow the prohibition of the deterioration or destruction of breeding and resting sites to be defined and enforced with regard to mobile marine species;


• Where offences are created, meaningful penalties need to be applied;


• There needs to be better coordination of planning across all regions and all industry sectors throughout the UK. Overall spatial planning, licensing and enforcement needs to be separated from those bodies promoting industry sectors to ensure the process is unbiased and transparent, whilst independence needs to be sought across all oversight


• Strategic Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Assessments need to be carried out that do not pre-suppose that development is inevitable;


• Codes of Conduct should be made legally enforceable across all sectors with a lead organisation made responsible for enforcement. Impact studies should be undertaken in areas where recreational and commercial pressures may exist;


• Effective methods and incentives that promote compliance with laws need to be introduced, including via the appointment of marine wildlife tourism officers located in areas of high marine tourism activity and/or areas which are particularly vulnerable;


• Government needs to make a firm public commitment to cetacean protection so that it is clear to all sectors that activities at sea should take this into account.

I thought it was worth pointing you to a very interesting posting by Catherine Warren at the Huffington Post.

Catherine takes us through some recent history regarding how animals are treated in law is changing, and notes the recent change in US law in 2010 when the U.S. House of Representatives reclassified dogs from "equipment" to "combatants" in US military service.

The examples of online campaigning are also worth reading.

So the Japanese Government has confirmed that its diverting much needed relief monies to help the Antarctic industrial whaling fleet.

The government is using ¥2.3 billion from a supplementary budget for tsunami reconstruction to fund its annual whaling. The Southern whaling expedition left Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan on Tuesday.

I guess if I was any country or individual that has donated money to the disaster relief efforts in Japan, I might wish to ask for my money back. This is putting politics and ideology before rebuilding and possibly misrepresenting what donors meant their monies to go to.

For those of us based in Europe these are difficult days. The Euro crisis is not only incapacitating the EU in implementing EU environmental legislation (see the recent web postings on Morgan), but it’s also allowing what may appear to some as ideological attacks against this very same EU law and policy to go unchecked.

In the UK, the Coalition Government has put us on notice that it will not allow EU wildlife legislation to stand in the way of economic development. Gone are the days of the UK’s Prime Minister cuddling huskies and now in comes the might of the Treasury with a flame-thrower to the very protective measures that have brought some respite to our increasingly devastated oceans and wildlife.

We are, to say the least, in shock that the Coalition Government is considering reviewing the implementation of the EU Birds and Habitats Directives in England simply to create less of a burden on new developments. It is almost as if some ideologues are taking this period of uncertainty and austerity to pull down all the legislation that they have felt stood in the way of exploiting the marine environment for the last few decades.

In his Autumn Statement the UK’s Chancellor stated  “If we burden [British businesses] with endless social and environmental goals – however worthy in their own right – then not only will we not achieve those goals, but the businesses will fail, jobs will be lost, and our country will be poorer."

The Chancellor denounced the burden of 'endless social and environmental goals' on industry and went onto say, "we will make sure that gold plating of EU rules on things like Habitats aren’t placing ridiculous costs on British businesses."

The UK’s Habitats Regulations, which implement the EU’s Habitats and Species Directive, were brought into place by a Conservative Government in 1994 and have been a foundation stone on which protection for whales and dolphins and other marine life has depended. The UK is already the most lax implementer of the Directive and any dilution of the current law can only mean more loss of marine habitat and the diminishing number of whales and dolphins around the coast.

But maybe we should have seen this coming. A few weeks ago we saw the Liberal Democrat Minister Chris Huhne give permission for the start of exploratory drilling in the Atlantic Frontier, despite the fact that the EU has suggested that stricter environmental controls should be considered after the spill in the Gulf.

WDCS understands that Defra are now to undertake a review of the Habitat Regulations but we are greatly concerned that this will allow for every Tom, Dick and Harry with a grudge to bear to get their knives into the legislation. At a time when oil companies and other developers are arguing that they should not be facing restrictions, this will be a field day for their lobbyists.

WDCS believes that Defra now have a responsibility to champion the environment and show that the long term value of protecting our marine and natural environment is as important as the short term gains that come from opening up these last few frontiers to exploitation.

Link to the Defra review

Congratulations to the US federal judge who, for the second time in less than six months, has thrown out a lawsuit by the Alaskan State challenging an endangered species listing, this time involving Cook Inlet's beluga whales.

Alaskan state officials were reported to have been concerned that recovery efforts for belugas could threaten oil and gas development and shipping in the Inlet.

It appears that Escopeta Oil Co., which recently announced a major gas discovery in Cook Inlet, had intervened in the lawsuit on the side of the state against the US Government's listing of the belugas as endangered

"We maintain that the listing process was defective because it did not sufficiently involve the state or consider the conservation measures already in place to protect Cook Inlet belugas," a representative of the state said.

But in his ruling, the federal judge took note of the state's conservation measures and rejected them as inadequate.

"Ultimately, whatever conservation efforts were already being made by the state ... clearly had not demonstrated a degree of effectiveness sufficient to alleviate concern over the small population size in Cook Inlet, since the population had shown no signs of recovery and was indeed continuing to decline," the judge wrote in his decision.

So from everyone at WDCS congratulations to all those who campaigned to maintain the protected status of the belugas and congratulations to the US Government for getting this one right

Read more on this story

Several years ago I was watching a documentary on North Korea and I am afraid that I had to stop watching. It was not the usual story of abuse of human rights, or the kidnapping of Japanese nationals - all terrible in their own right,- it was the image of small children starving.

I had not long become a dad myself and that certain something had clicked inside where cruelty to children was no longer an abstract crime, but was now a gut-wrenching, breath-taking reality. I think some of you will know what I mean.

Well it appears that despite the fact that the nation of North Korea has millions of starving children and declining agricultural production, their self appointed leader can still afford to import dolphins for his own amusement.

The contrast in Kim Jong-il's priorities should escape no one.

WDCS joined this week with the Humane Society of the United States and Defenders of Wildlife to sue the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for continuing to allow fisheries that it manages to injury and kill endangered whales, like the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

“In an increasingly busy ocean, the survival and recovery of the North Atlantic right whale depends on protecting each individual from entanglement-related injuries and deaths,” said WDCS's Regina Asmutis-Silvia.

The lawsuit points out, “Each year, critically endangered North Atlantic right whales and endangered humpback, fin, and sei whales become entangled in commercial fishing gear. In these incidents, fishing line wraps around whales’ heads, flippers, or tails, often impending basic movement, feeding, and reproduction, causing infection, and sometimes preventing the animals from resurfacing, resulting in drowning.”

It also notes that so far this year “there have been at least seven new right whale entanglements, ten new humpback entanglements, and at least two right whales have died from entanglement-related injuries.”

We shall let you know how the case progresses.

Our congratulations also this week to the UK's FCO. A WDCS and AWI team busted the sale of whale meat at Iceland's Keflavik International Airport. Prompt action by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to remind UK citizens that purchasing whale meat and attempting to import it into the UK and Europe would be an offence led to the Icelandic authorities withdrawing the whale products from the airport shop.

Okay, so now I have seen everything.

Japan, devastated by the tsunami and earthquake, reeling after Fukushima, is going to spend even more money on subsidizing its whaling fleet. ABC is reporting that around an additional 2 billion yen will be put into the overall support (some estimates put it at the equivalent of Aus$40 million) for the loss making fleet.

And the reasons reported for this. Japan does not wish to loose face in being seen to give into opposition to its whaling policy.

So Japanese people will suffer, areas of Japan will be rebuilt later, just because Japan cannot get over a cultural hurdle? What is so stupid is that the disasters of the last year are the perfect excuse for Japan to save face and get out of this preposterous business once and for all.

But no, Japan's pride in its unnecessary whaling is so important, that it must be put before the safety and future of millions of Japanese, many of who care little about whaling or are unaware of the global opinion about Japan's renegade whaling.

Yep, now I have seen everything.

It seems that what some of us have been saying for some time is slowly dawning on some of the proponents of whaling.

If you want healthy oceans, we need many more whales and dolphins.

The Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið reports that Örnólfur Thorlacius has questioned the issue of whether whales are eating all the fish, a popular myth postulated by proponents of whaling to ensure the continuance of government support, in the form of both political and taxpayers money, for the continuation of an outmoded industry.

In an article entitled 'Can we lose the whale from the food chain' the author questions why it is that with so many whales removed by whaling, the oceans are not teeming with life, pointing to work in the southern hemisphere that shows whales are integral to the heath of the oceans.

So Icelanders, you may be weakening the future of your own fishing industry by the insistence of a few individuals that whaling continues. It seems that the many will pay the price for the gain of a few rich individuals. And there was me, thinking that Icelanders had learned that lesson in the last few years.