Captain Paul Watson
Captain Paul Watson
Founder, Captain Paul Watson Foundation, anti-whaling and environmental activist, author
(1950 - )
"You only have power in the present. And that’s where you can define what the future will be."
About the Canadian seal hunt in the 1970's: "Bearing witness? Being there just to photograph animal abuse? You don’t walk down the street and see a woman being raped and stand there and take pictures. Bearing witnesss to me is cowardice. It’s a nonintervention. I never understood it. We should not be submissive to these people destroying the planet. We should be aggressive; we should stand up and stand tall and get in their face."
"We're just a conceited, naked ape. But in our minds we're some sort of 'divine legend,' and we see ourselves as some sort of god. That we can walk around the earth deciding who will live and who will die and what will be destroyed and what will be saved. But the fact is we're just a bunch of primates out of control."
"Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment."
"If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights."
"Seafood is simply a socially acceptable form of bush meat. We condemn Africans for hunting monkeys and mammalian and bird species from the jungle yet the developed world thinks nothing of hauling in magnificent wild creatures like swordfish, tuna, halibut, shark, and salmon for our meals. The fact is that the global slaughter of marine wildlife is simply the largest massacre of wildlife on the planet."
"Feeding fish, whale and seal to children is a form of child abuse."
