Japanese whalers are taking the minke

In justifying the hunting the minke whale by Japanese call it as "the cockroach of the sea". So why eat cockroaches and call it research? Ironic how the minke whale was named after an 18th-century poacher, hey? Amazing that Norway had whale conservation laws in the 1700s:

clipped from www.abdn.ac.uk The minke is the smallest of the baleen (filter-feeding) whales and is found throughout the world's oceans, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. The minke is the whale most likely to be seen from the shore in the U.K. and Ireland, especially in Scotland, the Northern Isles and Western Ireland. It is rare in the Southern North Sea and Channel region. The story of this whale's name illustrates its blighted history. Minke was an 18th-century Norwegian whaler, infamous for regularly breaking the rules concerning the sizes (and therefore species) of whales that he was permitted at that time to hunt. Soon all the small whales became known as "Minke's whales". Eventually, it was formally adopted as the name for this small species.