Photo by cfdls.
Weird things available on Amazon.com in the U.S. include wolf urine, fresh rabbit, canned unicorn, deer butt, and (fake) horse heads. But until yesterday, the company’s Japanese subsidiary was selling something a lot more grisly: whale bacon, whale stew, whale jerky, and canned whale meat. Now, only a day after the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) put out a call to action to boycott Amazon, whale meat products have disappeared from the site.
EIA had reported that there were almost 150 of these products for sale (although to be fair, we didn’t see anything like that many before Amazon took them off the virtual shelf). Not only that, but the group bought some of the available products and found that many of them violated acceptable mercury levels and Japanese species labeling laws; the latter means that many of the products may actually have been dolphin meat, which isn’t any better.
Until yesterday, searching Amazon.co.jp for クジラ — kanji for “whale” — brought up several different whale meat products. Now it only brings up whale sake, and we’re pretty sure that’s just a brand name. Sure, that whale bacon is undoubtedly being sold somewhere else, but as far as Amazon is concerned, EIA can count this as a total win, and at record speeds.
