Thar she blows!

It’s whalin’ time! The Japanese are sharpening their traditional explosive tipped harpoon cannons and polishing their floating abattoirs in anticipation of a bumper catch this season. Purely for academic research of course, previous research having proven conclusively that most whales die when shot in the head with an explosive-tipped harpoon and that dead whales taste pretty good with wasabi and soy sauce.

Whaling is such an emotive issue. The vast majority of Australian’s would like all whaling stopped but I wonder if they can justify that opinion in a non hypocritical way. I personally want the Japanese to fuck off out of Antarctica, but my reasoning basically boils down to ‘cos it’s wrong’.

So I’m going to tackle a few reasons not to kill whales.

We shouldn’t hunt whales because they are endangered. Fair enough there. But the next question would obviously be can we hunt them when they are no longer endangered? Is it OK to hunt the Common Minke whale because there are still lots of them? If not then we move on.

We shouldn’t hunt whales because it’s cruel. Here again is a valid argument. From what I have researched it doesn’t look like most of them die immediately, so they probably do suffer quite a bit, which is horrible. But what if the hunters could guarantee an immediate kill, like in a cattle slaughterhouse? The Norwegians claim that 80% of the whales they kill die instantly (the Japanese claim 40%). Would it be ok to hunt whales if the hunters used a high explosive anti-tank gun that would vaporise the poor whale’s brain instantly so it didn’t suffer at all? If not then we have to move on.

We shouldn’t hunt whales because they are intelligent creatures. This one sounds good on the face of it, but falls over when more broadly applied. For example, pigs are pretty bloody intelligent too; as are squid and octopuses but they all make it to the kitchen table without a protest song. I really don’t think that we want to be applying the intelligence test to the animals we eat unless we are prepared to live with the results and only eat Golden Retrievers (surely the Down syndrome afflicted of the canine family).

We shouldn’t hunt whales because they are fucking whales and whales are awesome you fucking earth-raping Nazi! You only like them because they are beautiful, majestic looking animals, but where would we be if we only looked out for the cute animals? We’d have nothing but pandas, whales and baby seals left. Who’s going to save the bats, the leeches and the scorpions?

We shouldn’t kill and eat any animals because it is wrong to kill animals and the environmental costs are too high. If you happen to believe that the moratorium on whaling should be extended all the way down to oysters and everything in between then it pretty hard to argue with that. I may not agree but at least it is consistent.

I’m not pro-whaling exactly; it’s just that if a certain species of whale was not endangered and could be killed humanely, then I really can’t see any difference between that and someone shooting a kangaroo or wild pig. In the back of my head I hear a voice that says ‘but how can you kill a whale, its wrong’, but where is that same voice saying the same thing about cows, sheep and pigs? I definitely eat those, so I suppose I indirectly kill them.

It’s pretty clear in my mind that we, as greedy humans, have royally screwed up this world to the point now that we need to take drastic action to prevent a catastrophe. It’s now the time to put our faith in science, not our emotions, to provide us with solutions. The piecemeal approach that ‘Save the Whales’ epitomises is exactly not the kind of approach we need. It makes up hypocrites and fails to tackle the big, non visible, problems.

So much energy is focused on whaling but at the end of the day we are facing much bigger problems in our oceans. Every year we catch 3.5 million tonnes of tuna from the oceans. That's the equivalent biomass of 700,000 minke whales, and that's just one fish species out of the hundreds that we catch each year. The realist in me thinks that Japan only keep up their whaling to distract the world from their other fishing operations. They are distracting us with an admittedly cute hand puppet while they harvest the ocean (Japan is notorious for overfishing).

So I say don’t ‘Save the Whales’, but ‘Implement global fishing practices that ensure that all species fished are fished at a sustainable and constantly monitored rate with the purpose of minimising the impact on the ecosystem, also I am using the word fish to include the hunting of whales even though they are not fish but mammals’.

Can’t fit that on a badge though.