Japanese whaling in the Southern Hemisphere especially in Antarctic waters near Australia is an emotive topic for Australians, and likewise the Japanese, with one of the ardent anti whaling protesters sitting in a Japanese jail awaiting sentence.
Nothing short of flensing appears to be the minimum sentence for the Japanese whaling advocates.
I recall my first whale spotting.
It was off the cost of Western Australia, and I was on a boat travelling from Fremantle to Rottnest Island.
About half way there, someone cried "whales off the starboard bow".
We all turned around, and there following the boat were three whales, heads diving into the water and then resurfacing.
The captain slowed the boat until it was idling in one spot.
Every camera on the boat was activated and all the amateur photographers starting taking pictures.
The expressive oohs and aaahs were almost drowned by the constant camera clicking noise.
The whales seeming to know they had a captivated audience, so then proceeded to showtime.
One dived deep into the ocean, and then some seconds later burst the surface with a giant leap, slowly twisting his body, head pointed down, and doing a giant bellyflop on the water, sending spray 20 feet into the air like a mini geyser.
  One other whale, head submerged, raised a giant tail fin and beat the water into a foaming mass.
At the same time the third whale circled the boat moving slowly and  gracefully like a marine ballerina, submerging below the surface, then rising and expelling stale air in a huge steam engine like  noise, gasping in another thousand litres or so of fresh air, and disappearing down into the depths again.
This aquatic circus continued for some 15 minutes, then the whales in unison turned, dived, and were gone.
Every person was smiling or laughing and their absolute joy was palpable.
A never to be forgotten experience! Seeing a whale being killed is also an unforgettable experience.
Back in Captain Ahab's days (Moby Dick), the whale boats looked for and tracked the whales sometimes for months.
On sighting a whale, the row boats were lowered and the crew manned the boats with the harpooner at the bow of the boat.
The boats encircled the whale, and the harpoons were thrown.
The whale thrashed furiously and would dive to get away from its killers.
Eventually it tired, it no longer had the strength to fight, and it died and was towed back to the whale boat, where it was reduced to whale oil to power lighting systems around the world.
 Now it's all high tech, harpoons are mini torpedoes launched with computer technology, straight to the heart.
Death and dying is a much more efficient process! All in the name of science.
Whale research? Just by the way, we now have electricity for power, so there in no necessity for research into restoring whale oil to drive our high tech engines.
We Australians also do research on fellow humans, most with live testing in the areas of medical research, and with brain research trying to find cures for Parkinsons or MS, the patient is even awake.
Yes we do autopsies on dead persons to try to discover the cause or reason for death, but to my knowledge we do not deliberately kill the patient just so we can do an autopsy.
If the Japanese only want to experiment with dead whales, are there not enough dying already around the world? What about the whale pods breaching on beaches in remote locations where assistance cannot be given by whale saving volunteers? Why don't the Japanese simply install a Hotline number where people all over the globe can call and inform them of the whereabouts of dead whales? Better still, why not use all the latest technology to research LIVE whales? Now there's a new thought.
Why not follow whale pods underwater in a manned bathysphere? It would have sonar, precisely like the submarines, sound equipment to capture the whales singing, underwater cameras to film every movement ( after all we do have Hubble, which currently is photographing the Universe some billions of light years away), we have array telescopes which also scan the skies, we have MRI scans to provide 3D scans of the body for our doctors to interpret, in fact we probably have every type of research device in the world which could be used on a live person.
So why not a whale size MRI! DNA tissue samples do not need to be taken from a freshly slaughtered whale; if we can extract DNA from a million year old dinosaur, then go look for some 100 year old whale bones.
My second query relates to the results of this whale research.
Has the world been flooded with the Japanese announcing astonishing biological discoveries? Has a Japanese research scientist won a Nobel prize for whale research? Have Japanese nutritionists found whale blubber to be better for you then a Wagyu steak? Have McDonalds created for their new global move to health and less calorific food, the whale burger with extra cheese-The McWhale? What is the word in your mind right now? No, I don't have all the answers, nor do I have solutions.
But I do have the capability to add another voice to the ever growing chorus of people worldwide who condemn the killing of what  is surely one on the most beautiful marine animals and mammals on this planet.
Purchase a CD of whales singing and listen to it in the dark.
You can palpably feel the intense musical communication between them.
I have a final thought though.
If, as I understand from some newspaper articles written last year or perhaps the year before, the Japanese have a veritable lifetime of stored tins of "whale spam" in underground warehouses, stacked floor to ceiling in their millions.
So when the voracious and insatiable appetites of the Japanese for any sort of seafood from prawns, lobsters, oysters, sea fish, crabs and our Blue Fin Tuna, reduces the marine life to an impossible level to sustain breeding so that they become extinct, and we Australians suffer from deprivation of what was previously a cornucopia of local seafood, they intend to sell us back all of the stockpile of tinned whale meat! Isn't trade a wonderful thing!