When is it non-violent to throw acid at someone? When he’s a Japanese whaler, apparently. Crew on the Sea Shepherd group ship the Steve Irwin hurled a number of unpleasant projectiles at the Nisshin Maru on Monday.
Quite how serious the projectiles were depends on your point of view. The BBC makes them sound not too bad, calling them “containers filled with a mild form of acid made from rotten butter” along with what the protesters call “slippery chemicals”.
This acid is butyric acid and it is extremely smelly (see the Molecule of the Day blog). Here’s some of the safety information on it:
Harmful if swallowed or inhaled. Corrosive. Extremely unpleasant smell may cause nausea. Liquid may burn skin and eyes. Readily absorbed through the skin. Severe skin, eye and respiratory irritant.
“I guess we can call this non-violent chemical warfare. We only use organic, non-toxic materials designed to harass and obstruct illegal whaling operations,” says Paul Watson, captain of the Steve Irwin (press release).
Four of the crew of the Nisshin Maru who have injuries might dispute the “non-violent claim”. “Sea Shepherd is not an environmental group. It is a terrorist vigilante group that operates outside of the law,” says Minoru Morimoto, director general of Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research (press release).
There has been some glee over the attack in blogs and comments, although I wonder if these people would think the same thing acceptable if it was the Japanese deliberately trying to make the decks of a Greenpeace ship too slippery to work on.
Japan has lodged protests with the Australian government and the government of the Netherlands, where the Sea Shepherd vessel is registered. It has also summoned the countries’ ambassadors in Tokyo to demand they control the protestors. “That was an inexcusable act to inflict unjustifiable damage to Japan’s ship and to harm the safety of the crew who are operating legally in the public sea,” says spokesman Nobutaka Machimura (Sidney Morning Herald).
In other whaling news “experts in conflict resolution” have been called in to the International Whaling Commission meeting in London later this week (Australia’s ABC). And a Norwegian group is claiming, in Reuters’ words, that “harpooning the giant mammals is less damaging to the climate than farming livestock”.
Image: Steve Irwin alongside Nisshin Maru via Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research