Connecticut's state animal is being killed again. After 14 years of global protection, the largest-brained animal on earth is being brutally slaughtered for the profit of commercial Japanese whaling companies. The great sperm whale can no longer roam its ocean depths in peace. It has once again become the helpless target of the whalers' bloody harpoon cannons.

Despite the strong disapproval of the International Whaling Commission at its July meeting in Australia, despite unprecedented personal appeals by U.S. President Clinton and the Prime Ministers of New Zealand and the United Kingdom, despite a condemnatory letter signed by 24 U.S. senators and all six of Connecticut's congressional representatives, despite clear opposition expressed by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright directly to Japan's foreign minister in face-to-face talks in Japan, the Japanese government has brazenly proceeded with its announced new whale hunt.

Four Japanese whaling vessels left Japan for the northwest Pacific on Saturday, July 29, 2000, to engage in the relentless and ruthless pursuit of two rare species of endangered whales - sperm whales and Bryde's whales - which, because of the IWC's global moratorium, had been spared from killing for nearly two decades. By early September, Japan's catch had included five sperm whales.

Back in 1975, the Connecticut legislature, in recognition of the sperm whale's contribution to Connecticut's historic whaling past and because of the species' endangered status, made the sperm whale the state's official animal.

At that time, more than 23,000 sperm whales were being killed annually around the world. But after intensive efforts by conservationists, with United States' leadership, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1982 banned all commercial whale killing for an indefinite period, and in 1986 Japan finally agreed to stop taking sperm whales.

Now, after years of global protection for these magnificent leviathans, Japan's resumption of the killing of even a small number of sperm whales for so-called "research" purposes is an affront to nature and to the opinions of humankind worldwide.

The claim that these whales need to be killed for "scientific research" is utterly without justification. Reams of data from past killings have been accumulated over the years. We already know that sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal ever to have lived on our planet - four or five times the size of a human brain, and comparably complex and convoluted. From decades of past studies of the contents of dead whales' stomachs, we know what they eat (mostly squid), and we know their diet does not pose a threat to commercial fisheries.

The IWC Scientific Committee has consistently discredited Japan's purported "research" whale killing and urged the adoption of non-lethal means for continuing whale studies. New Zealand whale researchers, for example, have just completed a significant new study of 136 individually identified living sperm whales off Kaikoura.

According to a recent poll, an overwhelming majority of Japanese people themselves do not support whaling.

Now is the time to turn back the tide of escalating environmental endangerment. We must let Japan know that the United States and other peoples around the globe will not stand for the whalers' brutal defiance of universal efforts to save the whale and save the planet.