Interview: Sea Shepherd Founder Paul Watson's Eco-Warrior Journey: Reveals All Book 'Hitman for the Kindness Club'

Adriaan Buys: Yeah, and that’s when you contacted Aida Fleming about joining the Kindness Club, which is the title of the book, right?

Paul Watson: Yeah, though I didn’t actually contact her—my mother signed me up.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah, I remember that.

Paul Watson: Aida Fleming was an interesting woman. She was the wife of the Conservative Premier of New Brunswick, Hugh John Flemming, and she set up this Kindness Club to teach children to be kind to animals. Albert Schweitzer was actually the honorary president. I remember reading the literature she sent out. I never met her until I was in my 20s when I was coming back from leading the Greenpeace campaign to protect harp seals off the East Coast. L. Johnson and I decided to drop by and see Aida Fleming. She was quite delighted to see us, and as I left, she said, "You’ve become the Hitman for the Kindness Club." That’s where I got the title for the book.

Adriaan Buys: That’s fantastic. I must say, reading your book, it really feels like that. I also think that your initial encounter with the beavers—destroying those traps—is almost symbolic of your career, where you’ve destroyed machinery and various man-made things to protect wildlife.

Paul Watson: In the mid-70s, I devised a strategy I call "aggressive non-violence." It means intervening without hurting anybody. We’ve never injured anyone, but I believe that destroying an inanimate object to protect sentient life is justifiable, especially if that object is being used illegally. For example, if someone is about to shoot a rifle at an elephant and you smash the rifle, to me, that’s an act of non-violence. But we live in a society where property is valued more than life, so any damage to property is considered more violent. Our values are misplaced. Imagine walking into Mecca and spitting on the Black Stone—you wouldn’t make it out alive. Or going into Jerusalem and hacking away at the Wailing Wall—you’d likely be shot. Nobody would have any sympathy for you because you attacked something sacred. Yet every day, we desecrate and destroy the most sacred and beautiful cathedrals of the natural world—the rainforests of Amazonia, the Great Barrier Reef—and what do we do? We write letters, sign petitions, dress up in animal costumes, and jump up and down with protest signs. That’s about it. If the rainforests and reefs were as sacred to us as a hunk of marble in Rome or an old wall in Jerusalem, we would literally rise up and defend them, no matter what the cost.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: But we’re so connected to this anthropocentric reality that everything not man-made is considered exploitable.

Adriaan Buys: It’s crazy. I don’t know how we can change that mindset—to expand the way we see living beings or even other humans. When you see what’s happening in Israel and so on, you start wondering if we even care about other humans the way we should. But how can we expand public sentiment about animals, to include them as other sentient beings deserving of rights and protection—almost like we would protect other humans? Just like how the world intervened during the Second World War when a population was targeted and abused. How do we get people to care about what’s happening to biodiversity and wildlife around the world?

Paul Watson: I’m not really sure we can. We’ve been so indoctrinated into this collective mass psychosis of anthropocentrism that other living things are alien to us. We don’t even give much thought to them, and we don’t understand how important interdependence and diversity are to our own survival. A few years ago, I got a call from Brett Hume, a reporter for Fox News. He said, “At a recent lecture, did you say that trees, birds, whales, and fish are more important than people?” I said, “Yeah, I think I did.” He said, “How could you say something so outrageous?” I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “You said that they’re more important than people.” I said, “Yes, and I’ll tell you why: because we can’t live here without them. We need them; they don’t need us. Ecologically, they’re far more important than we are. In a world without fish or trees, we’re not going to live. But a world without humans? I think it would do quite well.” Again, it’s this idea that we’re just better, that everything is made for us. Anthropocentrism has also led to endless wars throughout our history. We don’t even respect our own species because we divide ourselves into this group and that group, like different football teams, and then go beat the hell out of each other. We all have these little pieces of cloth that we identify with, and we justify everything we do. With Hitler, it was the master race; with Israel, it’s the chosen people. It’s all the same thing. I don’t even believe we got together to go after the Nazis in World War II for noble reasons—it was all about a power grab. To me, World War II was really about the destruction of the British Empire and its replacement with the American Empire. It’s always opportunistic moments to seize what someone else has, and it will constantly change. It’s all over territory and ridiculous beliefs.

Paul Watson: But what I do see as a solution, and the reason I set up the Church of Biocentrism, is that it’s based on three fundamental laws of ecology: the Law of Diversity, which says that the strength of an ecosystem depends on the diversity within it; the Law of Interdependence, which states that all species within an ecosystem are interdependent; and the Law of Finite Resources, which says that there’s a limit to growth because there’s a limit to carrying capacity. When one species steals the carrying capacity of all the other species, it diminishes both diversity and interdependence, leading to ecological collapse. So if we don’t find a way to live in harmony with other species and respect those species, we’re simply not going to survive. Hopefully, a minor ecological collapse might be a good swift kick in the ass to teach us a lesson. But the situation is perilous.

In 2010, there was an article in Scientific American that stated that since 1950, there’s been a 40% diminishment in phytoplankton populations in the sea. Phytoplankton provides up to 70% of the oxygen in the atmosphere. If phytoplankton were to disappear from the sea, we couldn’t survive on this planet. The forests of the world, which are also being cut down, only provide 30% of the oxygen. Why is phytoplankton diminishing? Because we’ve diminished the population of whales, dolphins, and other marine animals, which are the farmers of the ocean. They supply the fertilizer for the phytoplankton—the nitrogen, iron, and magnesium, which are the nutrient base for phytoplankton populations. Basically, the animals feed the plants, and the plants feed the animals. This is even true on land. About 200 million years ago, flowering plants developed, and people don’t like to hear this, but flowering plants actually own us. They’ve manipulated us for 200 million years—really, all animals.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: What they do is create these nice little flowers to attract animals and reward them with nectar. For mammals, they provide fruits so we can spread their seeds. We’ve become incorporated into the sexual reproductive system of the plants, and we don’t realize they’re using us. They’re not doing it consciously, but they’re using us, and we get the rewards. In fact, the most manipulative plants are the grains and things like that, which we’ve made so successful because we’ve cultivated them, made them stronger. The real problem, of course, is that there are about 500 species of potatoes, 600 species of apples, and so on, but we decided only these six are okay. That creates a real problem because if anything happens—just like the potato famine in Ireland, where they focused on only one species—the whole thing can collapse. That really illustrates the need for diversity. We should have access to all 600 species of apples and 500 species of potatoes.

Adriaan Buys: Right.

Paul Watson: We’re losing the Cavendish banana, which is in big danger because it could be wiped out. It’s only cloned; it doesn’t really grow—you have to clone it. The banana that went extinct in the 1950s, commercially extinct, was wiped out by a plague and replaced by the Cavendish. But because we’re focusing on that one species, if a disease hits it, bang, it’s gone. This is going to be a major problem in the future. Another issue is that the diminishment of ecosystems leads to the transmission of viruses. This is why every year on factory farms, they kill literally millions of chickens and pigs, burying them alive or gassing them to keep the lid on those Petri dishes, which are factory farms, to keep those viruses from spreading. For instance, domestic salmon farms in British Columbia are transmitting viruses to wild indigenous salmon populations, diminishing those wild salmon because they don’t have the antibiotics and chemicals to protect them. When you reduce an ecosystem and remove certain species, the viruses associated with those species have to go somewhere—they need a new host. And there’s nothing more attractive than eight billion primates walking around doing stupid things.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: The common cold came from horses; chickenpox and other diseases came from animals. We’re going to see more and more of that. When I read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague in 1995, she predicted all of this—West Nile virus, Hantavirus, Ebola, COVID, all of it. And it’s going to get worse. On top of that, you have the release of all these bacteria and viruses from the melting permafrost in the Arctic. They’ve already revived some worms and things that have been there for 40,000 years. In 2017, an anthrax virus came out of the permafrost, killed a thousand reindeer, and one human being. This is going to be more and more of a problem in the future.

Adriaan Buys: I don’t know how we’re going to change things because, theoretically, the UN says we’ve reached peak child, so population growth should start declining by 2050. But globally, we’re still growing. There’s also upliftment happening, with people in developing countries aspiring to the American lifestyle—two cars in the driveway, living in a suburb, and the food choices that lifestyle affords. Ultimately, we’re still going to face issues with farming and global warming. I think—

Paul Watson: Yeah.

Adriaan Buys: I think I can still remember when that was massive in the public, right?

Paul Watson: Yeah, I’m still in touch with her, but she taught me a very valuable lesson when we brought her out to the ice floes off Labrador. She’s very courageous—flying through storms in a helicopter didn’t bother her at all. But by putting her cheek to cheek with a baby seal, we got the front cover of every major magazine in the world—Stern, Paris Match, whatever. Because we live in a media culture, reality is dictated to us by the media, and it defines our values. The media only understands four elements. Any news story has to have one or more of these elements: sex, scandal, violence, and celebrity. If you have all four, you’ve got a super story.

Paul Watson: I learned how to manipulate that and get a lot of celebrities on board to do things that are dramatic. For example, saying the Japanese are killing whales in the Southern Ocean—big deal. But if we go down there, risk our lives to protect them, get in the way, and have a big confrontation, now we’ve got a news story. People pay attention, even in Japan. We got headlines in Japan because of that.

The most perfect story I ever did was in 1984, when I led a campaign to protect wolves in British Columbia and the Yukon. It had violence—the shooting of wolves and the threats against us if we intervened. There was scandal—we caught the environment minister taking a bribe from a big game hunting organization. And there was celebrity—I recruited Bo Derek as our spokesperson. At the press conference, which was packed, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun said, “Come on, what does Bo Derek know about wolves? It’s ridiculous to have her as your spokesperson.” I said, “If I had David Mech or Dr. Gordon Haber here, the two foremost wolf biologists in the world, this room would be empty. But I see it’s packed with TV cameras, and it’ll be the front-page story of your newspaper tomorrow. You’re going to write it, your editor is going to give it a headline, and there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?” And that’s exactly what happened.

Adriaan Buys: It’s great that you caught on to that so early in your career. I think you were saved by two whales—you’ve risked your life multiple times. One time, you got stuck on these ice floes in the middle of the night, trying to escape from a ship, hiding in the bedsheets on the ice so you wouldn’t be detected by the police. The ice floes started breaking off, and you ended up almost falling into the ocean, with all four of you nearly dying that night. That’s not the instance where the whales saved you, but I wanted to give people an idea of some of the adventure stories. But you were saved twice by whales, in fact.

Paul Watson: In 1975, there was an incident that changed the entire course of my life. We came up with this idea to protect whales by getting between the harpoons and the whales, thinking they would stop whaling. We went after the Soviet whaling fleet, which was operating only 60 miles off the coast of California—this was before the 200-mile limit. We encountered the Soviet whaling fleet, and Bob Hunter and I got into a small boat and got in front of a Soviet harpoon boat chasing some sperm whales. This was a great tactic—it worked for 20 minutes. I looked back, and the harpooner was clearly frustrated because he couldn’t get a shot. Then the captain came running down the catwalk, screamed into the ear of the harpooner, turned, looked down at us, smiled, and brought his finger across his throat. That’s when I realized Gandhi wasn’t going to work that day.

A few moments later, there was this horrendous explosion as the harpoon flew over our heads and struck the female whale in the pod ahead of us. She rolled over on her side, blood everywhere, and screamed—I didn’t even know whales could scream. The largest whale in the pod suddenly rose up out of the water, slapped the surface with his tail, and swam right under us, throwing himself at the bow of the Soviet vessel. The harpooner, ready for this, pulled the trigger and hit the whale point-blank in the head with an explosive harpoon. The whale fell back into the water, screaming and rolling in agony. As he did, I caught his eye, and he stopped. Then he submerged again, leaving a trail of bloody bubbles as he swam straight toward us. He came up and out of the water at an angle, ready to crush us. As his head rose out of the water, I felt that the whale understood what we were doing. I could see the effort he made to pull himself back instead of crashing down on us. He began to slide back into the sea, and as his eye disappeared beneath the surface, he died. He could have taken our lives but chose not to. I also felt something else—pity for us, not for them. Why were we killing these whales? The Soviets didn’t eat them—they were killing whales for spermaceti oil, prized for lubricating high-heat-resistant machinery, including intercontinental ballistic missiles. I said to myself, “Here we are, destroying this incredibly beautiful, socially complex, self-aware sentient creature to make a weapon for the mass extermination of human beings.” That’s when it struck me—we’re insane. From that moment, I decided I don’t do this for people; I do this for them, not for us.

Ten years later, after we sank half of Iceland’s whaling fleet in Reykjavik Harbor, I went to the International Whaling Commission. A former colleague from Greenpeace came up to me and said, “What you did in Iceland was reprehensible, criminal, and unforgivable.” I said, “Yes, so?” He said, “Aren’t you concerned about what people think about what you did?” I said, “No, not at all. We didn’t do it for the people. Find me a whale that disagreed with it, and I promise we won’t do it again.”

Adriaan Buys: And then?

Paul Watson: I make a lot of people very angry because, as I said, if you’re going to be an effective conservationist, you have to say things people don’t want to hear and do things they don’t want to see being done. You have to rock the boat and piss people off.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Adriaan Buys: There are almost two sides to this. There’s the marketing side, where you need to attract people to the cause and get them interested. Then there’s the other side, where we are in a crisis, and someone needs to communicate that crisis and let people see it. We spoke earlier about the forest destruction happening around the world. The latest forest report is out again, saying that if we don’t do something, by 2050, they believe the Amazon rainforest will actually start destroying itself because the heat is too high, the plants aren’t built for the rising temperatures. There’s also the droughts and fires—it’s been too dry, and there hasn’t been enough rain. On top of that, there’s the chopping down of the forest. While we’re focusing on saving these massive forests, other countries are chopping down their little forests, and when they get caught, they blame developing countries or point fingers elsewhere. “Don’t look at our backyard—look at those guys over there. The Amazon is the problem.” So how…

Paul Watson: Yeah.

Adriaan Buys: How do we keep this going? We get these reports every year—60% decline in wildlife around the world, forest destruction reports showing how many percent of the forest are lost, how many football fields are chopped down every year. We keep getting all this, but what can you do? You can only fight so many battles, and then your legal issues start piling up in different countries. You fight one battle in your own country, then you move on, and you’ve got legal battles there and in that country, and…

Paul Watson: The problem is we don’t want to change. Everybody wants change, but they don’t want to change. I remember years ago in Toronto, there was talk about cleaning up the Don River that flows through the city. I was at this meeting, and the pollution was horrendous. I asked, “Do we know where the pollution is coming from?” “Yes,” they said, “It’s this factory, it’s that one.” I said, “Shut it down.” And they all looked at me like, “What?” I said, “If you don’t want a polluted river, shut down the stuff that’s pouring pollutants into it.” The unions were upset, the government was upset, saying, “We can’t do that.” I said, “Then you don’t really want a solution. You just want the pollution to magically go away, and it’s not going to.” The Amazon will turn into a desert because all you need to do is cut a swath of clear-cutting and stop the atmospheric river from flowing, which keeps it what it is. Stop the atmospheric river, and everything goes. Just look at the history of North Africa—it once had forests, was very biodiverse, but now the North African elephant is extinct, the North African lion is extinct, the North African bear is extinct. All of these species went extinct, the diversity collapsed, and the Sahara desert moves 10 miles south every year, getting closer and closer. That was all a man-made creation, that desert. And we started…

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: But the giant cedars of Lebanon—we forget that Mesopotamia was incredibly fertile and diverse. Now, it’s a wasteland. We destroy it because we have this incredible ability as humans to adapt to diminishment. This served us well 20,000 years ago when we had to adapt, but now it allows us to just carry on. We wipe out the northern cod, so let’s go after another fish. Forget about the cod—we’re going to fish this now, then that. The fish get smaller and smaller.

In 1965, if I had said to anyone that in 40 years, you’d be buying water in plastic bottles and paying more for that water than the equivalent amount of gasoline, everyone would have thought I was nuts. But here we are. We buy water in New York City in plastic bottles, and New York City has the cleanest drinking water in the country because it comes from the Catskills through stone tunnels into the city. It’s absolutely clean, but they bottle it in plastic and sell it in LA as New York City tap water, and people buy it. You can market anything. I drink tap water in Paris with no problem—it’s perfectly fine. But nobody wants to do that because we’ve been conditioned to think it’s bad. It’s interesting that the water companies are owned by Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Coca-Cola makes more money selling water than they do selling Coca-Cola.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: And it’s just adaptation to diminishment, constantly. In the 90s, orange roughy was a fish you saw everywhere in supermarkets. You don’t see it anymore because here’s a fish that takes 45 years to become sexually mature and lives to be 200 years old—it couldn’t keep up with our demand. Unlike a salmon, which takes only four years to mature and then dies, we treat every fish as the same when they’re all different species with different lifespans. Lobsters can live to 200 years old, but they seldom get beyond seven or eight years today. And again, it’s adaptation. When I was a kid, lobsters were cheap—you could tell the poor kids in our town by the lobster sandwiches they brought to school on homemade bread, and we tried to trade them for bologna or peanut butter on Wonder Bread. Lobsters used to be called the poor man’s meat, and it was actually illegal to serve it to prisoners because it was considered demeaning. In Rhode Island, they used to catch lobsters solely to fertilize potato crops. Scarcity translates into profit, so what we have now is what I call the economics of extinction. As we drive species into diminishment, their value goes up, and therefore the exploitation increases.

Right now, we’ve removed 90% of the fishes from the ocean, but people don’t believe that because if you go to a fish market next door, everything you can imagine is there—very expensive, but it’s there. People say, “Obviously, there’s fish to get.” I say, “Yes, but it’s costing more and more money to catch those fish.” We have hundred-million-dollar super trawlers, 100-mile-long lines, 100-mile-long gill nets, purse seines—an incredible amount of technology to get less and less of what was once very plentiful. We have satellites telling us where the fish are. We just came back from the English Channel, where there were six giant super trawlers taking everything. Every net we filmed was the size of three school buses being pulled in, and what was in those nets? Blue whiting and herring, which are then rendered into fishmeal for factory farms and to turn into fish pellets for domestic salmon. These are the food fishes for everything else. We’ve got to leave these little fishes alone, but no, they’re going after everything right now. Fishmeal is 40% of all the fishes taken out of the oceans, rendered into fishmeal for factory farms and salmon farms. Now, we’re going after the krill in the Southern Ocean to turn that into a protein paste to feed to domesticated animals. What we’re doing is replacing wild animals with domestic animals, and what are we doing? We’re slaughtering 90 billion animals every year—ninety billion. The numbers are mind-boggling.

Adriaan Buys: That is mind-boggling.

Paul Watson: And it’s the single greatest contributor to dead zones in the ocean, the single greatest contributor to groundwater pollution, the single greatest contributor to greenhouse gas production. Yet we just carry on because we don’t want to see a solution. I wrote an article last year about the Burning Man event they have every year.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah. Friends of mine are very keen on that—they go every year. They’re big enthusiasts.

Paul Watson: What struck me is that last year, some people from Extinction Rebellion and other groups went there and put up a barricade, blocking people from going in, protesting about climate change. The people in line got violent with them, calling them nuts, ordering their arrests, destroying their equipment, because they were blocking their way into Burning Man. And three days later, bang, the whole place gets flooded out—never happened before. They became the victims of climate change. If you go back to its original origins, the most Burning Man thing that happened last year was that damn blockade on that road, but now you’ve got people coming in their private jets and air-conditioned RVs.

Adriaan Buys: My goodness.

Paul Watson: And that’s what it’s evolved into.

Adriaan Buys: One of my friends goes to Africa Burn, which I think is still a little wild. People can’t really go there in airplanes and stuff, but—

Paul Watson: It has a few years up on the other one, I guess. But that’s what it is—we turn these things into something else. The same with environmental groups. They start with the best intentions, but then they get taken over by opportunists who see it as a way to make money. I call it greenwashing or “feel good.” Let’s join Greenpeace to feel good because we’re part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah, that’s true.

Paul Watson: I’m not very popular with environmental conservation groups because of what I say. I was the National Director of the Sierra Club in the United States from 2003 to 2006, and they tried to get rid of me because I kept asking questions they didn’t want to answer. But it’s always—

Adriaan Buys: But I mean, these are difficult questions. I spent the last two weeks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and I’m semi-vegetarian. I call it semi-vegetarian—some of my friends hate it when I say that. They say there’s no such thing as semi-vegetarian. If you eat meat, you’re not a vegetarian. I say I eat one meat meal a week, so that’s sort of my process. I have one meat meal a week, and that’s my contribution.

Adriaan Buys: But when I’m trying to eat vegetarian—how do I do that? When I go into a restaurant—

Paul Watson: It’s difficult.

Adriaan Buys: I need to find a vegetarian restaurant for my vegetarian meals. In Kuala Lumpur, you can’t find them—you have to go to specific vegetarian restaurants. The other restaurants don’t serve any meals without meat—every single meal has meat in it. There are thousands of little restaurants in the streets, and every meal has meat. Now, these are thousands of little restaurants. You can go from restaurant to restaurant—

Paul Watson: Yeah.

Adriaan Buys: What is the answer? We’re not going to turn an entire country like Malaysia into vegetarians.

Paul Watson: But we will when we have an ecological collapse, or more viral infections, or things like that. It will happen that way. But think about it—back in 1980, nobody even knew what a vegan was, and you certainly couldn’t find anything vegan in France. Now, in Paris, it’s very easy to find a vegan restaurant, and they’re quite good. My ships have been vegetarian since 1979, and in 2000, I made them vegan ships. You don’t have to be vegan to join the crew, but you have to be vegan while you’re on the crew, because that’s just the way it is. Nobody’s ever complained about it—in fact, people leave the ships healthier than when they came on. We try to set an example.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: And it also gets around people calling us hypocrites—“You want to save the fish, but you’re eating them.” Also, the other advantage of having a vegan ship is that when you pull into a port in Australia or New Zealand, you don’t have to worry about quarantine officers seizing every piece of meat you have.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah, and we spoke earlier about some of these meat cultures linked to cultures and religions. We specifically talked about the ships that transport sheep or lambs from various countries—I think specifically Australia—to Muslim countries. Recently, in South Africa, there was a big stir caused by the Al Kuwait ship, which came into Cape Town harbor. It wasn’t supposed to dock there, but they were redirected via the Cape. They had 19,000 cattle on board, who were starving because they couldn’t feed them. They had to dock in Cape Town to collect food, and the ship stank up the whole city. People were wondering, “What is that stench?” Nobody really understood what was causing it until they realized it was the ship. The stench was so bad from all the feces, and people started wondering, “What is the condition of the cattle on the ship if it smells like this in the city?” The SPCA went on board and found the cattle living in squalor, covered in feces from head to toe, lying in it. They actually had to euthanize some of the cattle. You mentioned in your book that in the Halal religion, originally, it was about being kind to animals, not abusing them, by slaughtering them live where they could see it. What is your feeling about that now?

Paul Watson: Halal laws and kosher laws were developed to find a more humane way of killing these animals. By the way, the Quran actually says you shouldn’t eat animals at all, and I think there’s a part of the Bible that says that too. But it was about the spirit of the law—the original intent was to be humane. But that got replaced by the rule of the law, so now we’ve forgotten the spirit and just follow the rule. “This is what the Quran says, this is what the Bible says, so this is how we’re going to do it,” even if there’s a better way to do it. Yes, I did see sheep being offloaded from Australia into Bandar Shahpur, now Bandar Khomeini, in Iran. They were herded off the ships, some of them with lost eyes from the rams’ horns, breaking their legs on the horrible dock full of holes. They just left the dead bodies there and moved on. Every one of these cattle and sheep ships throws dozens and dozens of bodies overboard every single day on that passage. The death rate is very high, just to deliver that. In this day and age, if they’re going to eat the sheep or the cows, at least they could slaughter them humanely and freeze them—they’re still getting the same thing.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: But that’s the rule of the law—the rule is you have to ritually cut their throats and do it that way. But again, if you read the Quran—I have read the Quran, I have read the Bible—it specifically says you shouldn’t eat meat. But again, every religion is great on rules, but not so good at getting people to adhere to those rules.

Adriaan Buys: You’ve spent your career fighting and dealing with these laws and rules. What I find interesting in your book is how well you know the laws and try to work within them to fight the system, but some of these laws are just so crazy and outrageous in certain countries. You try to work with the governments, which is what I see in the book.

Paul Watson: It’s almost impossible to do, though, because whatever you agree with one government, four years later, there’s a new government, and it all reverses. In 2010, I was invited by the FBI to give a talk at FBI headquarters in Quantico. They actually paid me to come and give a talk. At the end of the talk, one of the FBI agents said, “Sea Shepherd walks a very fine line when it comes to the law.” I said, “Does it really matter how fine the line is as long as you don’t actually cross it?” I’ve never been convicted of a felony in my life, so I’ve had a good understanding of the law. But the law is very complex—local law, provincial or state law, national law, international law, bilateral treaties, all of these things are so damn complicated. And then you have to deal with the fact that they make up laws specifically to stop you. For instance, when we were protecting seals on the East Coast of Canada, overnight, they passed an order in council law called the Seal Protection Act. Now, if you observe a seal being killed, you’ve just broken the law. If you film or photograph a seal being killed, you’ve just broken the law. If you disrupt someone killing a seal, you’ve just broken the law. If you approach within a half-nautical mile of a seal being killed, you’ve just broken the law. The only people ever arrested under the Seal Protection Act have been animal rights activists, conservationists, scientists, or journalists and filmmakers.

Adriaan Buys: That’s crazy.

Paul Watson: So, the laws are designed to protect the status quo. In the United States right now, we have the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. If you’re caught on a farm with a camera, taking pictures, you can be charged under that act—as a terrorist. If you’re caught in a slaughterhouse taking pictures, you can be charged with terrorism. If you cost any company more than $10,000 in losses by boycotting their product, you can be charged under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. In fact, even Oprah Winfrey was charged under that act many years ago because she said on television, “Don’t eat hamburgers.” She won the case, but it cost a lot of money to win. If your average person says on television, “Don’t eat hamburgers, they’re bad for you,” they could be charged under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

Adriaan Buys: My goodness.

Paul Watson: Laws are created all the time to stop things that people disagree with. In Germany a couple of months ago, they arrested a man before he left his house for a protest he was intending to attend because the intention to attend this protest was illegal. It was a climate change protest, which meant he had broken the law before he had even broken the law. We’re going to see more and more of this because as situations become more desperate, things are going to become more restrictive. I’ve been very fortunate in that I lived—I was born in 1950, so my generation has experienced the most materially wealthy time in human history. It’ll never come again. We’ve also experienced the freest time in human history—it’ll never come again. The things we did protesting in the 60s, 70s, 80s—we can’t do today. In 1983, I blockaded St. John’s Harbor in Newfoundland for two weeks. I prevented the sealing fleet from leaving for two weeks.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah, I was just reading about that part.

Paul Watson: If I did that today, they’d blow me out of the water. They’d feel justified in doing it. Now, everybody’s labeled a terrorist. No environmental conservation or animal rights person has ever killed anybody in the entire history of these movements. Nobody has ever killed anybody, but over 2,000 environmentalists have been murdered in the last 15 years, and you don’t even hear about it—mainly in places like Brazil or Colombia, or parts of Africa. Unless it’s somebody notable like Chico Mendes, you don’t hear about it at all. I used to say that if we were to injure or break the finger of a logger in Oregon, that would be the front-page news of The New York Times. But if they kill an environmentalist—which has happened in the US, loggers have done that—it’s not even a news story.

They always say, “Jobs are all-important. This endangered species—like the spotted owl—is costing 50,000 loggers their jobs. How can you justify that?” I said, during the last 10 years, 200,000 jobs were lost because McDonnell Douglas, IBM, and AT&T decided it was in the interest of their shareholders. So, that’s okay. If you lose your job at McDonald’s, nobody gives a damn about your job if it’s going to affect the bottom line of their profits. That’s all they care about.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: It’s the same with human rights. I always say human rights are all right as long as the price is right—as long as somebody’s making money off it. And when people say, “What is war good for?” I say, “Nothing.” No, it’s good for the economy. That’s what all these profits are dependent upon. Just look right now—because of Gaza and Ukraine, look at the shares of all these arms companies, shooting right through the roof. It’s good business, and that’s the kind of business so many governments are backing. When I see reports right now that Spain and France are going to stop their arms shipments to Israel, I think, “What the hell were they sending them there in the first place for?” Why are we shipping all these arms? Why is Sweden one of the major exporters of weapons and landmines? Sweden is one of the major exporters of landmines, but you don’t hear about that because they make so much money from it.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah.

Paul Watson: Every country—the United Kingdom, France, all of them—are involved in this. It seems strange—you’re getting all this stuff in, but you’re manufacturing weapons and selling them to African countries. It just doesn’t make any sense at all, except that it’s such big business. You build a tractor, sell the tractor for $150,000, and it’s probably good for service for 15 years. You can repair it, you can fix it, but it’s only $150,000. Now, build a tank for $25 million—one tank—and that tank will be blown up in a year, so you have to build another one. It’s good for the economy.

Adriaan Buys: Yeah, and we’ve created this concept—a business or a corporation—which is not even human. It’s a creation we made that now ends up ruling us. We’ve created all these structures in our society, and they ultimately rule us. Listen, I could carry on talking to you for two days like this—this is my passion. I love discussing this stuff. But I guess we need to wrap it up because I’m not sure how many people will want to watch us talk for two days. Ultimately, we’re here for The Hitman for the Kindness Club, and this book of yours is a testament to your life. It’s a life that’s inspiring. It’s a life that...

Adriaan Buys: ...well, thank you for sharing these stories with us.

Paul Watson: Thank you.