Armored Car Without Penis. Let’s Save the Whales.

Russians who were looking forward to whale penis leather seats for their $1.45 million bulletproof SUVs are crying in disappointment, and pointing their fingers at environmentalists and Pamela Anderson for this grave injustice.

While the Prombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition SUV comes with gold trim, gauges encrusted with diamonds and rubies and three bottles of premium vodka, Russian millionaires will have to do without ultra soft and luxurious penis skin.

Here’s a snippet of the absolutely brilliant press release put out by Leonard F. Yankelovich of Dartz, the Prombron manufacturer.

ARMORED CAR WITHOUT PENIS. LET’S SAVE THE WHALES.

One month ago DARTZ presented uberluxury armored car with whale penis interior – PROMBRON’ (ex.RussoBaltique), lot of people name this car as DARTZ.KOMBAT. As the world’s resonance was very huge and DARTZ got lot of angry e-mails from Greenpeace, WWF and also Pamela Anderson, DARTZ make strong decision to stop their plans regarding such interior.

We have no any ideas to kill the whale or something like that. All we want – to make just luxury car. Real luxury car which will be world number one car. We just looking for most expensive products for this car – and that’s why we choosed whale penis leathure when we checked it is most of most. After wave of protest we realised our mistake and make a decision not to use natural leathure at all.

We will focus on world most advanced nanotechnologies to achieve interior highest quality using artificial materials which also was never used for cars. We want to tell our hello to all whales: “Our Sea Brothers! We all know that earth are stand on three whales – we will keep You live! We don’t Earth fall down to Ocean!”

Yes, we all know that earth are stand on three whales. Therefore, the world thanks you, Dartz, for making such a selfless sacrifice.

Link [JamesList] via [Wired]

Photo credit: JamesList

Climate Change Will Bring More Whale Beachings

Don’t you just love the smell of decaying whale while you’re catching some rays on the beach on a hot summer day? Get used to it, because scientists say whale beachings will soon become much more common – particularly in Australia. The reason? Global warming is going to bring their food stock closer to shore.

From Yahoo News (AFP):

Researchers tracking the beaching of whales in the region since 1920 said strandings tended to occur in 12-year cycles which coincided with cooler, nutrient-rich ocean currents moving from the south and swelling fish stocks.

“These animals, most of the time they’re trying to find food, that’s what they do,” said the project’s Corey Bradshaw, from Adelaide University.

“With climate change it is more likely that these kinds of oscillations will be more variable so you get more extreme conditions,” he said. “We could see more and more frequent strandings simply as a function of higher frequency (of) extreme events.”

Whale rescuers are going to have a huge – literally – task ahead of them once this starts happening. What’s really sad is, successful rescues don’t happen as often as animal advocates would like. Even if rescuers manage to get them back in the water in time, many aren’t able to return to deeper waters and must be euthanized. Just another reason to put our all into fighting global warming, as if we were lacking in that department.

Link [Yahoo News]

Sarah Palin Files Suit to Avoid Protecting Whales in Alaska

What’s the biggest threat to beluga whales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet? Two words: Sarah Palin. Belugas already have a lot stacked against them. Cloudy water in the summer forces them to rely heavily on echolocation to get around, and they must venture into dangerously shallow waters to find food. Palin, who is already infamous for her total disregard for animal lives, is filing suit to prevent the federal government from protecting the whales.

Her argument? “Alaska is already doing enough for whales”.

From Salon:

Palin’s chief of staff published an Op-Ed in the Anchorage Daily News on Jan. 28 titled “Protection Requirements for Cook Inlet Belugas Are Silly.”

While there are five stocks of beluga whales in waters near Alaska, the ones in Cook Inlet are isolated and genetically distinct from their cousins. That population has declined dramatically since the 1980s, from over 1,000 to about 375 now. More than 300 whales perished in one four-year stretch (1994 to 1998) alone, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. Marine mammal biologists and conservationists were hopeful that sharply limiting subsistence hunting of the whales by native Alaskans would see the whales bounce back. But despite only five whales being killed by hunting since 1999, when new regulations went into effect, the whales have not rebounded.

Even the Bush administration took note of the Cook Inlet belugas’ decline, after being pressured by environmental groups. In October 2008, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced the listing of the Cook Inlet population of beluga whales as a full-fledged endangered species. Yes, the Bush administration, infamous for its disdain for science when it came to protecting endangered critters, saw fit to offer protections to the belugas living in Cook Inlet. But not the Palin administration.

“It’s hard to imagine that anyone could be more anti-environmental than Bush, but Palin is Exhibit A,” says Brendan Cummings, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Here we had the most anti-environmental administration in U.S. history, and Palin still feels compelled to sue over one of the few environmentally positive things to come out of that administration.”

Marine mammal biologists don’t yet know what’s preventing the beluga whale population from making a comeback, but they do know that the health of the species could have implications for the rest of the ecosystem they inhabit.

Designating the beluga whales as endangered will also turn Cook Inlet into a ‘critical habitat’ for the whales, which is exactly why Palin’s administration is fighting the measure. They’re afraid that such protected status will hamper the “unfettered industrial activity” going on in the inlet – including the dumping of toxic waste by the oil industry. It could also affect plans to expand the port of Anchorage and build the Knik Arm Bridge – famously known as “the bridge to nowhere” – and curtail oil and natural gas drilling.

This is the same woman who advocates shooting wolves from helicopters and has an office full of dead animal trophies and a pile of caribou antlers sitting outside her house.  Her antipathy toward animals and the environment knows no bounds. So, none of this is too surprising. Luckily, advocates of protecting the whales are confident that the Obama administration will defend the beluga listing from Palin’s lawsuit.

Link [Salon.com]

Canada Chooses to Kill Over 500 Narwhals Rather than Save Them

Once a year, Canada uses powerful icebreakers so hunters can gleefully kill thousands of baby seals and sell their downy white pelts. And yet, somehow those same icebreakers weren’t available when over 500 narwhals – whales with tusks resembling the horn of the fabled unicorn – became trapped under the ice. Instead of rescuing the whales, local hunters began killing them by shooting into the ‘blow holes’ where the animals surface to breathe.

From CBC News via Treehugger:

Elders and wildlife officials have agreed that the whales would otherwise die from starvation and a lack of oxygen as the sea ice closes in around them.

Hunters in Pond Inlet, a mainly Inuit hamlet of about 1,300, say they’ve been turning down requests from media outlets to fly into the community and cover the hunt.

Jayko Allooloo, chairman of the hunters and trappers organization in Pond Inlet, told CBC News that his group does not want cameras capturing images of whale carcasses laying about, in case some viewers think the hunters are wasting meat and blubber, also known as muktaaq.

Meanwhile, the organization that manages wildlife in Nunavut is defending the Pond Inlet hunters’ decision to kill all the trapped narwhals in what DFO has called a “humane hunt.”

“Those groups or individuals who are making these accusations, or trying to come up with ways to prevent this kind of incident [from happening], have to be aware this is a northern climate. It’s a harsh country,” said Harry Flaherty, acting chairman of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.

Narwhals are not officially listed as endangered, but they should be – experts say they’ll be greatly impacted by climate change, even more so than polar bears. Experts have said that narwhal hunting is not sustainable. Hunters in Pond Inlet are only supposed to kill up to 130 narwhals a year.

Treehugger notes that the DFO claims the noise from the icebreakers would have been too stressful for the narwhals. Yeah, because loud noise is really less stressful than seeing your family members killed right before you get shot yourself. That makes a lot of sense. How incredibly sad and sickening.

Link [CBC] via [Treehugger]
Photo credit: National Geographic

Help Hayden Panettiere Get 1 Million Signatures for Anti-Whaling Petition

‘Heroes’ actress Hayden Panettiere got lots of attention last year when she joined anti-whaling activists off the coast of Japan, paddling surfboards into a cove in an attempt to interfere with a dolphin hunt that was taking place. Since then, she’s continued to work on behalf of the whales, and this weekend she traveled to Washington D.C. to form a giant whale with hundreds of other supporters outside the U.S. Capitol Building.

Earlier this week, Hayden announced a new campaign that she’s working on with social networking site SocialVibe to gather one million signatures for the Whaleman Foundation petition, which seeks to stop all commercial whaling and lethal scientific research whaling in Japan, Norway and Iceland and to enforce the current global whaling moratorium.

Head on over to SocialVibe to add your signature, and pass this info on to your friends!

Link [Ecorazzi] + [SocialVibe]

Whale Protection Increased Despite Sarah Palin’s Protests

Whales 1, Sarah Palin 0.  While the Republican vice presidential nominee has been railing against increased measures to protect Beluga whales that live in the Cook Inlet of Alaska, her objections failed to keep the federal government from putting the whales on the endangered species list.  Palin’s administration has opposed the Beluga listing because of its potential to restrict offshore oil and gas drilling.

From The New York Times:

The relatively small, whitish whales, sometimes visible from downtown Anchorage, declined by almost 50 percent in the late 1990s, and federal scientists say they have not rebounded despite a series of protections, including a halt to subsistence hunting by Alaska Natives. About 375 whales have been counted in Cook Inlet each of the last two years, according to scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The announcement, made on a predetermined schedule under the Endangered Species Act, drew further attention to Ms. Palin’s positions on environmental issues. The governor, the Republican nominee for vice president, has come under scrutiny for her ambiguous statements about climate change and her administration’s failed effort earlier this year to prevent another species, the polar bear, from being listed as threatened. The state is suing the federal government over the polar bear listing.

The fisheries agency says that the Beluga whale population has been threatened by general development, pollution and oil and gas exploration.  So, for now, these whales may be saved from the brink of extinction – no thanks to Sarah Palin, running mate to so-called ‘environmental advocate’ John McCain.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Noise Pollution Becoming a Bigger Problem in the World’s Oceans

We’ve already sullied the oceans of the world with oil, chemicals and trash.  Now, you can add another type of pollution to that list – a type that cleanup crews, no matter how passionate, can’t control. Noise levels in the oceans have reached such high levels that whales, dolphins and other marine mammals can’t properly communicate.  It’s so bad, that some species of whales have actually died because of it.

From Mental Floss:

It’s not so much that the noise we humans produce underwater is greater than what we produce on land, but that creatures of the sea are so much more sensitive to it. Baleen whales emit low-frequency calls that can travel a thousand miles in water — an essential kind of long-distance calling plan for an animal whose kind are far more sparsely distributed than before commercial whaling took hold. Other kinds of whales and dolphins use high-frequency clicks to locate prey, and sound is important to all marine mammals “in ways that are clearly important to their survival, though not completely understood,” according to the BBC.

And it’s not just high-energy sonar from naval operations that’s drowning them out — the engines and propellers of large ships, whose movements across the open ocean are mostly unrestricted, can be a major problem, as well as the seismic blasts associated with offshore drilling operations (drill, Willy, drill!).

This video shows the effect of sonar on whales:

Can we do anything right, when it comes to our influence on our surroundings? Humans really are like a virus, spreading across the earth and negatively affecting nearly everything we come into contact with.  We really haven’t thought beyond our immediate needs, and how our actions affect the world.

Link [Mental Floss]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Bush 0 Whales 1, Federal Court Rules Against Use of Navy Sonar

President George Bush got smacked down by Johnny Law this week when a federal court over-ruled a White House exemption allowing the U.S. Navy to use whale-damaging sonar. According to the court decision, Navy ships can’t use sonar within 12 nautical miles of California, must turn it off when whales are spotted and avoid places where they live.

I’m not sure they have quite thought this thru. Whales are sea mammals. Therefore they live in the sea. Therefore the ENTIRE sea is out of bounds for Navy vessels?

We think this is a remarkable development and we will be looking forward to seeing a case in court on behalf of the Leopard Gecko (Iraq desert) and the Steppe Eagle (Afghanistan).

In fact, we hope in future armed conflicts will have to consider the full Environmental Impacts from the start.

“Sorry George,” says Condy “there is a rare newt in Tehran. We’ll just have to relocate the war someplace else”.

Link [Terra Daily]