Sea Shepherd — the environmental organisation defending whales against arsehole Japanese whalers on “researcher” cosplay — have a powerful new weapon: unmanned aerial vehicles. They have located a Japanese whaling fleet 1600km north of the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary using a drone.
The good news is that one of their new drones has intercepted the fleet before any captures. Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin is now on course to intercept the Japanese fleet. Captain Paul Watson says that they now have an advantage they never had before: “Eyes in the sky. We can cover hundreds of miles with these drones and they have proven to be valuable assets.”
According to Sea Shepherd’s Jeff Hansen, “Right now we’ve deployed a drone which has gone up and taken aerial surveillance which has located the factory vessel, but we’ve also picked up three harpoon ships on our tail and security vessels but that’s not going to deter us in our mission.”
Last year Sea Shepherd ships blocked the Japanese whalers saving 858 whales out of 1035 — the number of whales the Japanese had planned to hunt down.
It’s too bad they don’t have Predators carrying torpedeos or some AGM-65 Mavericks. That would save a lot of fuel and provide with some nice underwater environments. Heck, give me an old Avenger and I will do the grunt job myself. [ABC News Australia and SMH]