Faroe Islands: Anger over killing of 1,400 dolphins in one day
bbc.com
bbc.com
In fact, some cultures were successful colonists. Should they be allowed to capture the Faroe islands and enslave the locals under the guise of "cultural heritage"?
Times change, and human society on the whole must change. Cultures that refuse to change can and sometimes should be cut off from the rest of society. How well would they handle being isolated by the rest of the world, with no commerce or outside support? I suspect they would suddenly decide to leave some practices in the past.
It looks graphical, but if they eat them, which I understand that they do, what is really the problem?
Just to add context: A common dolphin weights around 150 Kg, a bottlenose dolphin around 400 Kg. Most of those dolphins are pilot whales, that are technically dolphins but bigger. More close to orcas than to dolphins. A male pilot whale can weight between 800 and 3500 Kg. We are talking about millions of Kg of biomass extracted from the sea.
They have also complex societies; so is not just "we killed one animal". If you kill the grandmas the entire herd suffer [1]
And pilot whales eat mainly deep water squids, soaked in ammonia and unedible for us, so...
less pilot whales => more unedible squids alive that compete with => edible fishes so we have => worse fisheries and less money in hands of the fishermen
This animals have an economic value also when alive. You can hunt each one one time... or could fill a boat with tourists willing to pay to see it, and repeat the process from the next fourty years, that is what they do in Canary Islands:
https://www.freebirdone.com/details/short-finned-pilot-whale...
So, maybe Faroese are not so smart as they think.
[1] Most animals don't have grandmas and grandpas. Normally post reproductive animals are useless for the species and are killed fast in nature. This is not the case in an exclusive club that includes us, elephants and many dolphins including pilot whales. They have a important role in the education and care of the baby whales while they parents hunt in deep waters. They keep the maps of the ocean and lead the group also so they live long past their reproductive age.
In fact, it is now a sport activity carried out when someone spurs Dolphins and an adhoc hunt is carried out.
Could you elaborate on the perspective that you suggest we should have? I am curious since these are sentient creatures with complex social structures that we are talking about here.
But hunting is of course much more humane than meat factories. I don’t think there is anything wrong with killing animals per se, but animals farmed for meat live awful lives, hunted animals don’t.
In Europe is even illegal to harass them. Their fat stains all and smell for weeks and their meat is not really very good. Some similar cetaceans are treated as toxic waste when die in a beach because lot of toxics accumulate easily in the fat.
This is a strange exception to environmental laws that is basically a tantrum of a few people (50.000 against 740 millions of people) and not really justified. Economically is a waste of resources and is bad for local tourism. Moreover this animals don't "belong" to Faroese people. The same whales migrate from Senegal to Iceland. They are so Portuguese, or French, as Danish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_white-sided_dolphin
At the same time, pigs can be pretty smart. Too bad they are made of bacon.
I’m not saying that a pig in comparison has less worth by the way. Quite the contrary.
Definition of vegetarian diet might be a bit stretched here.
Either way you don’t condone killing all deer in a certain forest, do you? So much “game” that there won’t be any one healthy animal left?
We are farming pigs and guaranteeing a supply. We are not farming dolphins. There will eventually be as many as mammoths.
We should still be concerned.
That said, dolphins will actively protect humans in the water when sharks are around. for that reason, I'm disgusted at the idea of eating an animal that actively chooses to assist us when we are in danger.
One such is the annual Taiji dolphin catch in Japan[1]. But native Alaskans and Canadians have certain rights too.
As long as they don’t contribute to extinction this is better than modern animal husbandry such as veal.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiji_dolphin_drive_hunt
How would you feel as your entire clan was herded into a box canyon and slaughtered with knives, as you wade through their blood awaiting your knife?
The "Cultural Heritage" argument is indeed nothing more than an utter bulls*hit excuse when it comes to such barbaric practices. By the same token, we could justify punishment of being tarred, feathered, drawn and quartered in the town square.
I'm not sure it will be in our lifetime, but I fully expect that eventually all eating of killed meat (vs cultured/lab-grown meat) will be seen as barbaric as other barbaric middle ages practices, and as slavery.
Dolphins have language, complex society & culture, self-awareness, use tools, use names for themselves & each other, have higher brain/body-mass ratio vs humans, invent games, act ethically, cooperate across species, and that's just the start of the list when we're only just starting to research the topic.
With all of those components of intelligence (and some features even more advanced vs human capabilities), it should not take much intelligence to see how having opposable thumbs and the ability to write and build on information is a very small step in terms of actual intelligence, BUT that this yields massive visible differences in abilities to change one's environment. (It's still to be seen if this is an actual survival advantage - the Great Filter may still be ahead of us, and be accidental suicide by technology misapplication).
Also, claiming that a single point "invalidates" all other arguments commits a number of fallacies, including Overgeneralization, Non-Sequitor, and Argument from Incredulity...
If you want to feel like it's OK to kill and promote killing of other species for no good reason, it'd be better to just own it than to attempt justifying it with dismissive displays of ignorance.
Even in the “Western” world the lack of statutory rape law in France (just changed this year) was mostly ignored because it was just considered part of French culture.
https://www.giveindia.org/blog/four-reasons-why-india-recogn...
And those cultures are very proud to have been more technological advanced than the colonized and had the vision to conquer and spread civilization. I'd google for "Black Legend" if I were you.
>I suspect they would suddenly decide to leave some practices in the past. That's very naive, you just have to look around a bit to see that many cultures don't really care if some people in other parts of the world find them outdated.
I guess a similar issue already exists with commercial fishing and the 1000s of animals killed as collatoral, except Dolphins being larger and more intelligent does seem much worse.
53 protected cetaceans more were killed this week
Tradition need not mean good, this one is clearly barbaric by modern standards.
Its sounds like the supposedly trained-and-certified "traditional" hunters here fell far short of such ideals.
If one wanted to end this particular tradition, that seems like the best angle to attack it from.
wat
You do understand that > Killing animals [. . .] as a hobby [. . .]
Is something that happens in most places, right? Hunting exists. It's multi-billion dollar industry.
What about hunting defines a culture as barbaric? If it's done within appropriate and ethical legislative or regulatory contexts, and not to endangered or threatened species, what does it matter in defining whether a culture is barbaric or not?
Same can be said for Fox Hunting.
You can only eat it in small quantities
From the BBC story:
"The carcases were pulled ashore and distributed to locals for consumption."
Danish have not more rights to hunt whales for cultural or historical reasons that Spaniards should have. Do you think that Faroese invented cetacean hunting? It was called Basque Whale for something. And do you know what? We stopped it. Because we wipped them. Spaniard whalers got extinct with the whales. Their children just found a different job. We admitted our mistake and changed.
Almost 100 years later the Basque Whale that was common once in Europe still avoid our coasts. There are a few thousands of those whales remaining in all the N Atlantic. His japanese cousin is much worse. They are not pigs. Not even close.
So what this people did is a huge "f*k you, I'm different" to the rest of Europe. Not more, not less. They don't even understand that this whales don't eat fishes [1].
We see a lot of this anti-knowledge people raising again from their caves lately. Spain is in middle of its first six generation forest wildfire and... surprise, surprise, it was deliberated. As usual just a few weeks after the Californian wildfires. A man lost his life trying to fight against this crime, so... What we can do with those kind of people?
Keep trying to respect their feelings? their "my culture is special?" Trying to justify it because the bullshit "we do it for the meat that nobody needed"?
NOPE
[1] I know it. I have necropsied a few that stranded dead. And don't let me talk about the parasites in the meat, or about the smell.
(That being said, it would appear they overdid this one, what with there being some 40-50,000 Faroese or so, all told - that would be an awful lot of whale to digest per capita.)
Full disclosure: I happily eat minke whale and even seal whenever I come across it. Norwegian.
In some ways this is better than fishing fleets, there is no bycatch and they aren't trawling or reducing stocks. But there is also an international ban on whaling, and they are part of the EU which also has a ban. In this case it was just that the pod was much larger than normally finds its way to the isles