Japan’s whaling fleet returned home after killing 333 whales in the Antarctic, achieving its goal for the second year under a revised research whaling programme.
The Fisheries Agency said, the five-ship fleet finished its four-month expedition without major interference from anti-whaling activists who have attempted to stop it in the past. Japan says the hunt was for ecological research. Research whaling is allowed as an exception to a 1986 international ban on commercial whaling.
Opponents of the Japanese program say it’s a cover for commercial whaling because the whales are sold for food. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2014 that Japan’s Antarctic whaling program should stop because it wasn’t scientific as Tokyo had claimed.
