The whales they research aren't endangered. Also, other nations and people hunt whales.
> Similar loopholes will be found here, for example: if i capture a rhino and send it to a farm for 1 week, is it now a animal that we can do "research" on? What about 1 month?
That's a possibility. But more likely, it'll create more tiger/rhino "farms". Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is debatable just like trophy hunting.
Also, the threat to tigers and rhinos aren't poachers. It's loss of habitat due to human population growth. Where humans live in numbers, it's hard to have tigers and rhinos around because they can easily kill humans. It's why most tigers and rhinos in the world today are in zoos or wildlife enclosures.
Actually that's a big threat, sorry to burst your bubble, they're threatened by multiple different human factors.
Does it really matter? Number of countries agree not to whale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling#International_Whaling_...) and Japan is OK to do that?
> Also, other nations and people hunt whales.
Other people kill people as well. Should I be afraid of you?
A grand total of ...two. And not at the scale of the Japanese. Iceland even exports whale meat to the Japanese because they don't eat enough of it. To top it off, Japan has to subsidize the "industry" (quotes used because Japan claims it's for research) because it's unprofitable.
Sources:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729043-000-taxpayer...
https://www.ifaw.org/united-states/our-work/whales/which-cou...
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151203-why-do-some-countrie...
It's not about endangerment, it's about recognizing that the earth is a fragile system that we're pushing closer to the edge with every extinction. We have a responsibility to our descendants to take care of their planet for them until they can arrive.
Except this literally doesn't apply to Japan. The whales Japan is hunting are not endangered, and there is no proposed mechanism whereby Japan's whale hunting causes ecological harm. The IWC's own scientists recommended the whale hunting moratorium be removed around 1994.
Ah yes, the "two wrongs make a right" argument.