Some people just don’t know when to shut up. Japanese whalers ridiculous PR

The nasty arrows are much more dangerous that explosive harpoons - Apparently. Photo credit Institute of Cetacean Research

January 2010. The so called The Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) do themselves no favours with their extraordinary press releases. Sitting in an office some 15,000 miles away, Wildlife Extra does not claim to know exactly what happened in the recent collision between a Japanese whaling vessel and the Ady Gil, the Sea Shepherd vessel attempting to stop the whaling. There should be nothing funny about the whaling, or Sea Shepherds attempts to stop it, but ridiculous claims and assertions make the ICR a laughing stock. We did point out last year that the Sea Shepherd claims that captain Paul Watson's life was saved when a bullet was stopped by a badge he was wearing seemed "unlikely", but here are a selection of almost laughable claims by the ICR, all from 1 release. And we save the best until last.

Some examples

• Willful pollution (With misspelling ED). A recent ICR press release claims that the Sea Shepherd Society "is wilfully polluting the Antarctic environment." Apparently "an oily substance thought to be fuel is leaking from the Ady Gil and continues to spread over the sea surface." - This is the same people who take a small fleet of vessels into the Antarctic every year, including a supply vessel that carries oil. The other ships of the fleet refuel at sea, a notoriously accident prone past time even when the waters are calm. Sea Shepherd claims that, at some risk to their own crew, the Bob Barker did indeed remove much of the fuel from the Ady Gil so as to avoid polluting the seas as much as possible.

• Why on earth didn't Sea Shepherd tow what was left of the Ady Gil some 2000 miles across some of the world's roughest seas? Photo credit the Institute of Cetacean Research.

  Abandoned the Ady Gil. The release then states that "The Bob Barker has left the scene abandoning the drifting Ady Gil by the early morning of December 8." (Seems a long time ago?) I am not a sea-faring man, but to tow a badly damaged trimaran from the Antarctic to a safe port does seem an improbable task. And if the ICR are that concerned, they do have the option of towing it themselves.
• Lethal-force weapons! In what seems a comedic complaint, the ICR claim that the recovered "various drifting objects including several bowgun arrows" from the sea near the Ady Gil. They further point out that "carrying and possession onboard of a lethal-force weapon makes one ponder whether they would hesitate or not to produce casualties." Let me just take a reality check, go and stick my head in the considerable piles of snow outside in an attempt to make sure I am not imagining this. Are these the same people that carry, and fire, 6-8 foot long (Our guess) explosive harpoons that are fired from large guns?

Wildlife Extra believes that Sea Shepherd may bend a rule or two, but ridiculous bleating like the above makes the ICR a laughing stock. And if anyone from ICR is reading this, -YOU NEED A NEW PR COMPANY!

Click here to read the full release.