By Elizabeth Willoughby on
With a five-year plan for training with high powered sonar and explosives by the US Navy, actor Pierce Brosnan says many hundreds of whales and other marine animals will be killed by the exercises, and thousands more will be deafened. He calls on the Navy to stay out of vital whale habitat during routine training.
“In the darkness of the ocean, whales depend on their hearing for survival, to find food, to migrate and communicate,” says Brosnan in a video clip for Natural Resources Defense Council's Save Whales Now campaign and the International Fund For Animal Welfare.
High intensity sonar that navies use to locate submarines can emit sounds as loud as a rocket blasting off, he says, so loud that it paralyses the ability to function. Past tests have resulted in the disappearance of whale species from areas and mass beachings of whales bleeding from their ears and around their brains. As well, Brosnan says air guns used for oil exploration emit intense noise bursts that can cover thousands of square miles.
Brosnan is also calling on the public to send messages to US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to adopt safeguards to protect marine mammals during training exercises and to quit defending their five-year plan in court.
“In the darkened sea,” says Brosnan, “a deaf whale is a dead whale.”
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