Читать книгу Captain Paul Watson Interview - Paul Watson, Michele Sciurba - Страница 22

We’ve read in an article a couple of days ago that the worldwide vegan movement could have a lot of influence on sustainability and the future of the fish and meat industry, even if only 1% of the Western population were vegan. Do you think the increasing number of young people choosing a vegan or vegetarian diet is a game changer?

Certainly, it’s a growing movement. When I look back to 1980, nobody knew what vegan was. Things have evolved. I believe that 3% of the U.S. population is now vegan. I think it’s probably more in Europe. We can see its success in the emergence of alternatives to meat, Beyond Meat, Impossible Burgers, etc. which compete with traditional meat cultures. It’s where the future is because there’s no other alternative. I mean if you look at any science fiction movie, Star Trek or whatever, the future is vegetarian. The human population numbers are just too great to sustain that kind of diet. Sea Shepherd ships began as vegetarian vessels in 1979. But in 1999, we switched to vegan. But we’re not a vegan organization. We’re not even an animal rights organization. We get attacked by vegans who say “Well, you guys aren’t really vegan because you’re not promoting veganism.” But we are. We just happen to be a marine conservation organization that practices veganism for ecological reasons. But then you get all these holier-than-thou people saying “Well, that’s not proper motivation.” Well, screw motivation. I don’t care about your motivation. I mean, we do it for ecological purposes. So, you think they would be happy with that (laughs) but the debate goes on between the meat eaters versus the plant-based eaters.

I find it somewhat amusing, because human beings have never really been carnivores. I mean, they like to say they are carnivores. In fact, we have been necrovores. We eat dead animals. We’re probably more closely related to vultures, hyenas, and jackals than anything else because most of the meat that people eat has been dead for six months or a year, in some cases even longer. So, we’re eaters of dead flesh. And we have to disguise that meat with dyes to make it look nice. I mean, they crush beetles for God’s sake to dye meat. They put them in a bath of bleach. They pump them full of all sorts of chemicals. It’s insane what they are doing. I don’t know if you ever visited a meat market for instance in Brazil. I went to a meat market in Amazônia once. I couldn’t believe it. You know, when you walk through a supermarket in the Western world, you see all these red steaks. Walk through a meat market in Brazil, the meat is grey, greenish, flies are everywhere, you know, it stinks.

Three years ago, the price for a full side of beef in Frankfurt matched the world market price and was around $40 then. This is insane, unethical and an ecological disaster.

The prices are a result of subsidies. In the European community, we have all these agriculture subsidies. Which are good on one hand and on other hand they destroy our sense of the value of products.

Industrialized fishing wouldn’t exist without massive government subsidies. That’s the only way it can be sustained. The EU is an institution that promotes piracy. Europeans and Asians engage in piracy by plundering the waters of Africa. The pirates of Somalia, who are they? They are fishermen who have been robbed and have nowhere to go and turn to robbing out of desperation. It’s almost like a tax on ships which go through their waters based on what has been done to them in the past. But we don’t look at it that way. I mean, Spain is one of the leading pirate fishing nations in the world, probably second only to China, and yet, we try to get them into courts, and Spanish judges claim they don’t have any jurisdiction outside of the waters of Spain, even if the ships are sailing under the Spanish flag.

Shark Finning

There seems to be no truth to the claim of the international fishing lobby that 20 or 30 % of the global maritime areas are protected.

We think it might be less than 1%.

Even those protected areas are not safe from poachers. 300.000 sharks a year are taken out of the Galapagos marine reserve illegally. There is a lack of political and economic will on the part of governments to do anything to stop it.