The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was founded in 1977 by Paul Watson, one of the founding members of Greenpeace, as an aggressive direct action organization dedicated to the international conservation and protection of marine wildlife in general and marine mammals in particular. The society seeks to combat exploitative practices through education, confrontation, and the enforcement of existing laws, statutes, treaties, and regulations. It maintains offices in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, and has an international membership of about 15,000.

Sea Shepherd regards itself virtually as a police force dedicated to ocean and marine life conservation. Most of its attention over the years has been devoted to the enforcement of the regulations of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which makes policies for signatory states on whaling practices but does not itself have powers of enforcement. The stated objective of the society has been...