I was reading about the near run thing for whales recently, in that the Japanese narrowly avoided getting sufficient votes at the last big international whale meet (ha ha) to slaughter more of the unfortunate creatures. In the spirit of learning stuff I visited the Japanese whale research stations website to learn more about what they had learnt after many years of 'scientific whaling'. Basically it seems to come down to whales are big fuckers and they eat a lot of fish, thus, we should kill them before we starve. I noticed that they encourage questions so I thought 'why not' and sent the email below.

Dear Scientists,
I am doing some homework on whales and I was wondering if you could answer my question. We all eat fish, we need it to survive - but I see from your website that whales eat fish as well. Can we not just kill all the whales so there is more fish for us? Perhaps we could poison them all, or hit them with sticks? My brother says he saw a whale once, and it smelt funny - what sort of whale was it.
thanks very much for your answer.

Donald Thribb, 11 and a half.

I'am not actually holding much hope out for an answer, but you never know

And the other news is Bingo! Its my driving test tomorrow and work summer party - hopefully in that order.