Boris Johnson harpoons Japanese government for resuming ‘brutal’ commercial whaling

Boris Johnson, formerly the UK’s foreign secretary, has launched a scathing attack on the Japanese government’s decision to resume commercial whaling. His article, printed in the Sunday edition of The Daily Telegraph, was headlined “Why is there not more outrage about Japan’s barbaric practice of whaling?”.

Johnson criticised the British media and public for failing to be moved to anger at Japan’s plan to resume next summer “the brutal harpooning of beautiful, intelligent and endangered mammals”.

Accusing the public of responding with “apathy” to the Japanese government’s announcement last week that it will withdraw from the International Whaling Commission in June before its whalers put to sea the following month, Johnson said “every single potential justification” put forward by Japan is “nonsense”.

Numbers of whales have recovered since a moratorium on commercial whaling was imposed but many species remain endangered. Johnson also dismissed claims there is no difference between harpooning a whale on the high seas and the slaughter of farm animals for food.

“Just you try and be harpooned. You see how you like it,” wrote Johnson, still considered among the front runners to replace Prime Minister Theresa May as leader of the party should she be forced to step down. “It can take hours for whales to die – in extreme agony. To skewer such a creature, with a barbed and inaccurate lance, seems almost blasphemously cruel. Never mind the conservation arguments – unimpeachable though they seem to me. The killing of whales should be banned on animal welfare grounds alone.”