Japan Calls Off Whale Hunt Early

[Image: "Sounding Whale, Labrador Sea" by David Blackwood].

* * *

I suppose there are 352 whales somewhere who owe their lives to Greenpeace tonight. Fortunately, Nature smiled, and reckless behaviour by the Sea Shepherd didn't cause a greater problem than it solved.

Chill out people, seriously. Remember, you can be part of the solution or you can be part of the problem. Stopping a whale hunt by causing an oil spill in Antarctica is not cool.

I say if Japan wants whales that bad they can start breeding them faster than they're killing them for a few centuries, until the whales are back to more normal population levels, maybe not where they were before nations like Japan (and Canada) participated so merrily in their wholesale slaughter (let's be real) but better than they are today.

Oh, and by the way, stuff your country did a long, long time ago doesn't always automatically qualify as culture. You don't see anyone arguing for their right to have a smallpox epidemic, do you? Our ancestors in the 19th Century CE did what they had to to survive, and we should be able to commemorate that without a death toll. If they didn't eat whale they sometimes didn't eat, and the more sometimes they didn't eat the more oftentimes they died. Where would that have left some of us?

Thanks in part to those whales, though, we have thrived; indeed, nowadays we are overfed. Yet from this satiety we've been able to invent synthetic versions of everything we once got from them, save their flesh as meat. And just think: if no one ever had it again, eventually no one would remember or even miss the taste of it.

The best way to give thanks for our survival then (as well as in the future) is to ensure theirs now by leaving the whales alone.

Read more, at Yahoo News while I try and get down off this magical soapbox the Debate Club must have left lying about.
share on: facebook