Hey all, it seems a bit silly to be typing this when I have no followers and the whole blogging concept still feels alien, although lets give it a go. As you can see from my current information (although most of you probably know me personally at this stage...) I am nineteen years old, going into my third year at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Yesterday I returned from Tenerife where me and my girlfriend Sophie were volunteering for Atlantic Whale Nation (link) for just under a month. It was good fun, collecting data and raising awareness on whale watching boats, and it also opened my eyes to many an atrocity going on in the natural world. Obviously most people are aware of some form of brutal scheme, whether it be whaling (brought up recently at the International Whaling Convention (IWC) at Agadir in Morocco, which I shall touch on more fully later), the pet trade of primates, or the deforestation of key habitats for palm oil. There are always many more shocking things going on that people don't realise about as it isn't featured on the front page of the guardian or CNN top stories. One of the events that I became aware of through AWF is explained in great detail in the documentary The Cove (2009) (link). The basic outline being that hundreds of dolphins are driven into a cove of Taiji, Japan. Dolphin trainers from around the world travel to select these animals for their multi-million selling shows in places such as Sea World, paying several thousand pounds for a dolphin. The dolphins left unpicked are killed, often for its meat which is passed off as other meat products. I definitely recommend this documentary, it makes you think before paying for one of these shows.
An interesting fact about cetaceans in captivity:
Killer whales can live up to 80 years in the wild, however one in captivity is limited to a mere 5 years due to the stress of the crowd and noise mixed with cramped living conditions.
