Slaughtering Whales in the Name of Science?

[babylonsister]

Slaughtering Whales in the Name of Science?

By Ian Williams, Comment Is Free. Posted February 16, 2008.

It's a whale of a tale: Japan's claim that the whaling industry serves a scientific purpose is hypocritical and ridiculous.


Ceticide is silly, as well as not very nice.

I was addressing freshmen politics students at Paterson University about the British elections on the day that Tony Blair was first elected. "Could you tell them about Scotland and Wales?" the professor asked. A large and hitherto comatose football player in the front row suddenly raised his head from the desk and asked: "You mean, like Moby Dick?" Whales 'R Us for a whole generation.

Whales are clever and cuddly, and they sing. They even have names like Willy. Like eating dogs and horses, harpooning whales appalls the anthropomorphically inclined, a point realized by the Japanese who have responded to the recent Australian court ruling against Japanese whaling in the Antarctic by pointing out the relish with which their prosecutors eat kangaroo.

If the Japanese were to get up and say outright, "We actually like whale meat, we think it's yummy and we are going to chomp our way through it regardless of your anthropomorphic delusions," you could almost respect them. But they don't. They waffle on about scientific research while going through whales as if they were white mice in a laboratory.

As a born-again carnivore, when I chomp through a filet mignon, I don't pretend that it is byproduct of tissue sampling for "scientific research" unless gastronomy has moved recently from being an art to a science.

The Norwegians make no such pretense. These cozy Nordic social democrats and suppliers of U.N. peacekeepers, take as many whales as the Japanese and blithely admit that they are doing it for food. Of course, they are European, were on the right side in the last war and hunt in their own waters, so somehow Greenpeace leaves them alone. It may help that they take less than their own declared quota because demand for it is so low, but is cooking whale meat and eating it with knives and forks really any better than nibbling raw slivers on the end of chopsticks?

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/76784/