Goodhearted viewers, today’s Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants features Captain Paul Watson, legendary guardian of sea life and defender of the world’s marine ecosystems.

I believe that the answers are to be found in the impossible. And what I mean by that is that what we look upon as impossible now can be possible through the application of courage, passion and imagination.

As the founder and president of the non-profit organization the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Captain Watson has been at the forefront of global marine conservation efforts for more than three decades. He leads a compassionate vegan lifestyle, and has made all Sea Shepherd vessels vegan as well. His career as a staunch protector of animals and the environment began when he was a mere boy.

When I was 11, I used to swim with these beavers in the beaver ponds. And then the next year, they were gone. And when I began to ask questions, I found out that trappers had taken them all during the winter time. So I became very angry about that and began to walk the trap-lines in the winter and find the beavers and other animals, and release them. And then I destroyed the traps. Then I got involved with those animal rescue missions.

Now when Greenpeace formed, it was formed as a group called the “Don’t Make a Wave Committee.” And it was in response to nuclear testing by the Atomic Energy Corporation of the United States, where they were detonating a five megaton bomb under Amchitka Island up in the Alaskan Aleutians. And a previous test had killed about 1,000 sea otters and seals around the island because of the shockwave. Now, the “Don’t Make A Wave Committee” came together from two different groups; the peace side came from the Quakers, and the environmental side came from the Sierra Club.

And I was probably a little different than those two because my motivation was the fact that Amchitka was a wildlife preserve, and I thought it was a little absurd that you couldn’t carry a gun onto the island but they can blow a five megaton bomb up underneath of it. So that was my reason for getting involved. Now, in 1974 I helped Bob Hunter to move Greenpeace away from just nuclear testing (protests) to try and protect the whales. And then I got them involved with protecting seals on the east coast.

Captain Watson recalls the first-ever Greenpeace whale campaign, during which one particular experience with the giants of the sea left a profound impression upon him.

We were going up along the coast of Vancouver Island, and we were up in the Straits of Bella Bella, and we saw a pod of orcas coming towards us. And we were pretty enthusiastic at the time, so I remember three of us jumped into the water in front of this oncoming pod of orcas. We wanted to just film everything, just being involved with these orcas. And then all of a sudden they disappeared. And so we were just sitting there treading water, wondering where they were, when suddenly they surface right beside us.

And one of them was so close that I was able to reach out, grab his dorsal fin, and literally ride the back of this orca for about 200 meters. And the realization that in the entire history of orca-human relations, there’s never been an orca that’s attacked and killed a human being in the wild. And I think that’s certainly an indication of just how intelligent they are. We’ve had one of our inflatable (rafts) picked up on the tail of a Grey whale, lifted out of the water, and gently put back down.

Swimming with humpbacks, they’ll come at you and they’ll just raise their fin and right over your head and come down the other side. They could easily bump into you. They could easily injure you not even meaning to, but they’re very gentle, and they’re very sensitive creatures. And I personally think they’re the most intelligent life forms on the planet.

The incredible tenderness displayed by the orcas starkly contrasts with the unconscionable behavior of the ruthless whalers. A defining moment that spurred Captain Watson on his path came after witnessing the harpooning of whales in June 1975.

I was just thinking, “Why are we killing these whales?” You don’t eat whales. Sperm whales are used for sperm oil. And one of the things that they were utilizing it for was the development and manufacture of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

So I said, “Here we are destroying this incredibly beautiful, socially complex, intelligent creature for the purpose of making a weapon meant for the mass extermination of human beings.” And that’s when it just struck me: we must be insane. And so from that moment on, I decided that I would do what I do for whales and other creatures of the oceans, the sharks, the turtles, and the fish.

In 1977, Captain Watson founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to investigate, document and enforce laws protecting marine wildlife when illegal conduct is observed at sea. The organization’s valorous efforts to halt whaling are known globally and the group’s activities are the subject of a highly popular reality television series called “Whale Wars” that premiered in 2008 on the Animal Planet television channel.

Our approach has always been about not appeal to them morally or ethically, because I don’t think that people who are plundering our oceans really care, but to appeal to them economically. And right from the beginning with the Japanese whaling fleet, our objective was to sink the whaling fleet economically, to bankrupt them. And after seven voyages, I think we’ve managed to do that. And we’ve done that by making sure they don’t get those kill quotas. And every year we were able to save more whales than the year before.

And every year we got stronger, every year they got weaker, until this year we were able to shut them down completely. We just get onto their stern slipway of their factory ship and stay there. And if they can’t load whales, they can’t kill whales. Now, two years ago they tried to test me on this. We were blocking the slipway and they came in to try and unload a couple of dead whales. And we didn’t move.

And that resulted in three different collisions. They never tried again, because they knew that we were not going to back down. We were staying there. I mean I’m not really concerned about the damage to my ships; those are just steel objects and if they have to sustain the damage to achieve the objective, then that’s all well and good.

It’s just amazing what you do. Could you also comment on the fearless courage of fellow crew members in preventing the killing, and their love for the animals also?

The reality of it is that I couldn’t pay people to do what these volunteers do. That kind of courage, that kind of passion can only come from a volunteer base. And that’s what makes the difference. Sea Shepherd wouldn’t be able accomplish anything if it wasn’t for the passion and courage of all of our crew members. We’ve had over 5,000 people crew on our ships over the years. In this last campaign, it was 88 crew on three different vessels, and that was from 23 different nations. And so that is the backbone of this organization, is the volunteer crew.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society also strives to preserve the highly endangered Bluefin tuna.

In June of this year (2011), we will be intervening against poaching operations, primarily off the coast of Libya. The Bluefin tuna is an example of what I call the “economics of extinction,” that corporations actually make money by driving species into extinction. They want them to go extinct. And the reason being is that, for the most part, fishing operations have been taken over by corporations where it’s short-term investment for short-term gain.

They’ll make as much money as possible off of this particular fishery. And how to do that is through diminishment. You build up a five-year supply, 10-year supply, 15-year supply, as much as you can get. And as you’re doing this, you’re diminishing the numbers in the sea. And diminishment translates into higher prices for the commodity that’s in the warehouse. A Bluefin tuna, one fish right now, is worth US$75,000 on average. So, this kind of investment in extinction is what’s causing a lot of our problems.

In March 2011, Sea Shepherd signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Pacific island nation of Palau to safeguard sharks that inhabit a marine protected area from fisherman.

We signed an agreement with the President of the Republic of Palau to control poaching in Palau waters and we’re preparing to send our ship there. But, another factor has entered into that. Japan sent a delegation to Palau.. They’re offering to provide Palau with a patrol boat and the funds to run it, which, as far as I’m concerned, is fine. We will gladly withdraw if Japan makes good on that promise.

We’ll see how they do. Because what that’ll mean is that we can now go to the Cook Islands or Vanuatu or Tahiti and make the same offer. And if we can motivate Japan into providing patrol boats to all these countries, then I think we’ll achieve something very significant here.

Captain Paul Watson, we are ever-grateful for your steadfast efforts to defend our precious marine co-inhabitants and ecosystems. May the winds always be with you and the brave Sea Shepherd volunteers while sailing the high seas as you continue to gift compassion to our planet.

For more details on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, please visit

Please join us again tomorrow on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants for the conclusion of our interview with the intrepid Captain Paul Watson. Cherished viewers, it was a pleasure having your company on today’s program. Up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May we always be blessed with the immense love of the oceans and all the life within.