How you can help save the ocean
Sea Shepherd was established in 1977 by Captain Paul Watson with one ship and a mission to defend, conserve and protect marine wildlife around the world. Seeing the need for direct action, the first Sea Shepherd crews and volunteers placed themselves as physical barriers between people armed with clubs trying to beat baby harp seals to death in Canada and in between harpoons aimed for whales in the Antarctic’s Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Now, with the largest private fleet of ships in the world — known as Neptune’s Navy — we continue that fight on the frontlines in France, West Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea, and wherever we need to be to take a stand against the cruel destruction of the ocean and its inhabitants.
Sea Shepherd goes where many others can’t…or won’t, but we need your support.
Help support Sea Shepherd by starting a fundraiser today!
For the past five years, many of our campaigns have been focused on fighting one of the biggest threats to the ocean: illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Often using highly destructive fishing practices and conducted on an industrial scale in some of the most important areas of marine biodiversity, IUU fishing decimates populations of targeted species, which are sometimes already critically endangered. IUU fishing also contributes to the horrors of “bycatch”. Every year, industrial fishing results in hundreds of thousands of deaths of sea turtles, dolphins, whales, and sharks who are captured, killed and thrown overboard as “waste”, or ‘bycatch’.
We currently have partnerships in eight African coastal states to combat IUU fishing — Gabon, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and São Tomé and Príncipe, Benin and The Gambia — where Sea Shepherd provides the ship and trained crew, while the partner country provides law enforcement agents with the authority to board, inspect and make arrests. Since 2016 we have saved millions of marine lives by assisting in the arrest of over 60 vessels in our Africa campaigns.
In Italy, Sea Shepherd works with local authorities and the Coast Guard to help catch poachers red-handed. There we also retrieve tons of illegal fishing gear responsible for killing whales, sea turtles, and other marine wildlife in the Mediterranean Sea.
In France, our crew spend months in the frozen waters of the Bay of Biscay to document how an average of 6000 dolphins are being captured and killed every year in the nets of commercial fishing vessels as bycatch. We have been relentless in putting pressure on the French government to take action.
In Peru, a series of joint operations with the government of Peru on board the Sea Shepherd ship Ocean Warrior has helped apprehend multiple vessels fishing illegally in Peruvian waters.
In Mexico, our crew are protecting the world’s most endangered marine animal — the vaquita — by confiscating the illegal fishing nets of cartel-funded poachers.
After decades of fighting on our own to stop the slaughter of pilot whales and dolphins in the Faroe Islands, Sea Shepherd has just launched a new global coalition with over 30 organizations, public figures and politicians to #StoptheGrind once and for all.
In addition to conducting over 25 campaigns every year, Sea Shepherd volunteers around the world are also engaged in fighting marine debris by cleaning beaches and waterways where they live.
While the Sea Shepherd movement has expanded globally, with chapters in two dozen countries, it remains a predominantly volunteer-powered grassroots organization with minimal overhead. Which is why we need your help. With more than 90% of all donations going directly towards our campaigns, we rely on social media, merchandise sales, word-of-mouth and volunteer outreach at events to spread the word about our mission and the success of our direct action campaigns.
We’re grateful and hopeful to be able to showcase our work on this platform. When you use Streamlabs Charity to broadcast your live stream, 100% of the funds raised go directly to Sea Shepherd, which helps keep our fleet on the frontlines and our crew properly equipped to fight for the ocean!
Additional helpful links:
- Learn more about the Sea Shepherd organization
- Start fundraising for Sea Shepherd today
- Download the Overlays
- Install the Charity Alerts into Streamlabs Desktop
- Add the Charity Alerts into other Broadcasting software
