Japan resumes commercial whaling after 30 years
bbc.com
bbc.com
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whales_Nordic.png
There is increasing evidence that whales have a huge role in climate change. Their poop feeds plankton which in turn absorbs carbon. And their physical bodies when they die sink, moving significant amounts of carbon to the bottom where is stays in that ecosystem far away from the atmosphere.
If the Japanese and Norwegians don't care about killing such magnificent animals for food, perhaps they can be taught to value them as ecological partners in the fight against climate change.
While true, it looks bad for people who are on the fence and/or are ambivalent. If the people expressing the outrage aren't outraged about the whaling in the Faroe islands, it looks like they don't really care about stopping whaling but instead just want to protest for the sake of it (or they're racists against the Japanese, etc).
I am also no fan of the Canadian arctic whale harvest. That it is classified as "aboriginal whaling", and is much smaller, makes no difference to me. Dead whales are dead whales regardless who is killing them.
For ease of reference, the non-Latinate name for this flavour of the tu quoque fallacy seems to be 'whataboutism' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism).
- Japan learned modern whaling (and bought ships/tools) from Norway, over 100 years ago
- Norway's last catch of Minke whales (the only whales they hunt, supposedly) was about 1,052, out of an estimated ~100,000.
- Japan has recently hunted a variety of threatened and endangered species, such as Beaked, Minke, Bryde's, Sei, Northern Fin, Humpback, Sperm, Western Gray, and North Pacific Right.
- A significant percentage of whales caught are by-catch of other fishing operations, which critics claim is often intentional.
- Since 1988, Japan has caught 16,323 whales through "Special Permit Catches".
- The research group that does the whaling gets its funding from the Japanese government, and Kyodo Senpaku, the company that processes and markets the whale meat.
- The International Court of Justice declared in 2014 that Japan's whaling was not for any scientific purpose.
From these facts, I gather that the problem is that Norway is catching a "reasonable" amount of whales that are not threatened, and that Japan was catching endangered and threatened species in large numbers and lying about the intention behind it.
Japan is not the only nation to hunt whales. Norway has a commercial operation in its own waters, for example. But what infuriates conservationists is that Japan is hunting and killing whales in a conservation zone, the Southern Ocean whaling sanctuary, that surrounds Antarctica. Japan claims that it does so only for scientific purposes.
Then, a few years ago, the International Court of Justice – at the instigation of Australia and New Zealand – ruled that the country’s whaling plan had no scientific basis. Japan was forced to halt whale hunting and had to come back with a plan to carry out “scientific whaling” in the region. This now involves catching only 330 minkes, and no humpbacks or fin whales. It was an important victory for conservationists.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/23/sea-shep...
They did. Japan, Norway, etc. ignore it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Whaling_Commissi...
Sadly no. (I also got the impression that people didn't want to eat whale meat, which was why it was being foisted onto kids.)
Do the countries that hunt whales test the whale meat systematically?
I don't know that whale meat is economically viable.
If schools were giving out free samples of tobacco, marijuana, heroin, meth, etc., and urging kids to try it, how well would that go over?
My mother growing up in post-war Japan was fed whale meat in school lunches. It used to be eaten as a necessity, a cheap hunter-gatherer protein in the wake of the devastating war. It tasted really bad she says, and she doesn't seek it out, but for reasons of nostalgia and because it's now expensive it seems to have become a delicacy for others.
I am not suggesting that whaling is not harmful to the environment. But for me overfishing of tuna etc is much more dangerous because of its scale and economic impact. We need to find a way to fish sustainably, before the ocean ecosystem is damaged beyond repair and we lost our fisheries forever.
This should be the bargain. If you are going to hunt whales, the whales should have a chance to hunt you back. Require the use of oar powered wooden whaleboats, hand thrown harpoons, manila ropes. There is no sportsmanship in the way the japanese do it now.
Should be required to enter the cave with a pocket knife.
Although the article quotes a hunter claiming their village has done it for 400 years, it also later says “A number of coastal communities in Japan have hunted whales for centuries but consumption only became widespread after World War Two when other food was scarce.”
Also, whales aren’t being farmed, they’re just being hunted.
If people want to do something that's a tradition and is totally harmless, that's fine, but then it shouldn't need any protection. You only need "protection" because there's some reason the tradition can't continue without it.
It's a question of whether argument-from-tradition is a valid argument for continuing a practice. For relatively new "traditions", it's not. You need other reasons.
At the moment, there's very little we can tell about the exact make up of their intelligence.
Imagine, with your current intelligence, growing up in a world where you can move in three dimensions which has poor visibility but carries sounds very well. There are no fixed spots, so there is no "here". You also have no opposable thumbs, so you will never create tools or written records.
Now imagine that evolving over eons and generation upon generation: you might end up with a world view, a culture, and thought process that is complete alien.
What we observe as whale-songs might simply be them re-telling their Edda in an Ent-like fashion. We might be inadvertently hunting members of a species that is intellectually equal to ours, but too alien to understand.
It's not impossible that some animals besides humans could be capable of moral reasoning at that level. On the flip side, let's hope intelligent life forms from an environment totally alien to us never arrive here and get a taste for human flesh...
I wonder what the humpbacks have against orcas.
>let's hope intelligent life forms from an environment totally alien to us never arrive here and get a taste for human flesh...
If they have a book with the title "To Serve Man", run for the hills.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...
My father grew up in northern Illinois (where I was born and lived until a teen) and bemoaned the tearing down of the confederate monuments in the south, to which I rolled my eyes. Meanwhile parents strongly celebrated a Scottish heritage generations removed and comprising about 10% of my actual ancestors.
Cultures change. They evolve. They eat themselves, absorb other cultures, and sometimes fade from existence. It's all as important as you want it to be.
That said, if your culture needs to kill whales for funsies, I'm going to go ahead and personally say your culture isn't something I support and would prefer went away.
Japan has never cared about sustainable whale-hunting before.
We used to burn people for witchcraft and did so for a long time.
In certain states, fathers take their sons to KKK rally's to pass on their "culture and way of life", does not make it right.......
Maybe it's just time that we resume that practice.
Again, I had no intention of flaming anyone and if you noticed, I did not engage in any argument.
Or basically, like I said in my first comment in the chain, politicians in a healthy democracy should be responsive to their own citizens first, not to foreign activist groups that don't represent that culture and never had to stand for election among those people.
Most Japanese may support whaling, but don't actually eat the meat. The government has also been requiring whale meat in school lunches which has upset parents who don't want their kids eating whale meat, for either ethical reasons or the sheer amount of toxins that accumulate in whale meat.
Blaming the government is much more useful than blaming the public - policy can be changed, their position is articulated in press releases and documents. Trying to capture the diversity of the Japanese population and hold it accountable is an exercise in futility and is just muddying the waters.
They have any power what so ever? something like EU and Brexit?
If it isn't grown specifically for farming/hunting/fishing on a farm/elsewhere, then hard no. Wildlife just doesn't has any chance against modern technology.
Your stance doesn’t match current conservation best practices. Best practice is to determine ideal population balance and help that occur. Deer hunting is a necessity in much of the US to have any regular population control.
In some cases, culling of certain wild animal populations is actually beneficial to the ecosystem, e.g. in the case of invasive species, or certain native species whose populations have become unsustainably fast-growing due to external factors (habitat changes; predator or prey population changes, etc.).
Only when looking through the lens of fringe ideologies. The overwhelming majority of humans don't subscribe to moral ideologies that ascribe equivalent moral standing to humans and nonhuman animals.
That aside, you're right that I also do not assign equal moral standing to humans and nonhumans. However, that does not mean that the same arguments that make me reject culling humans don't also apply to other animals to some degree. I would argue the ethically most defensible approach would be nonlethal fertility regulation.
It isn't an idea; it's a reality. Establishing any sort of standard for moral behavior is necessarily an exercise in consensus-building.