Whales - Who Cares?

[ogr1]

CZJ is a minging welsh witch, just my opinion you understand.

[Wolf]

CZJ is a minging welsh witch, just my opinion you understand.

You're just jealous that Michael Douglas got to her first

[Paul in NZ]

Whale oil beef hooked.

If you are going to keep 'spouting' lines like this I'll get the 'hump' and be 'finn'ished here ....

paul N (call me Ishmael)

[Wolf]

If you are going to keep 'spouting' lines like this I'll get the 'hump' and be 'finn'ished here ....

Gods! Somebody krill me!

[Lias]

Well this threads gone to the dogs hasnt it :-).. Or is that the wolfs?

[Paul in NZ]

Gods! Somebody krill me!

Stop blubbering...

[Winston001]

Excuse me chaps and chapesses - its a bad halibut but if I could just interrupt:

Just learned that the Esquimo are allowed to kill an "aboriginal" quota of bow-head whales each year.

"Fin"ished now, as you were.

[Wolf]

Moderator! This thread needs moving - not to Pointless Drivel, but to Jokes and Humour.

[Edbear]

Just learned that the Esquimo are allowed to kill an "aboriginal" quota of bow-head whales each year.

Don't they have to use more traditional methods, though?

[Hitcher]

Don't they have to use more traditional methods, though?

Yes. They have to use kayaks and harforks.

[idb]

Psh! The planet is fine, it needs no saving. It'll be around long after we've followed the dinosaurs and all the species that we made extinct. It will bring forth new species to exploit the oil that was once our bodies and to mine the strange deposits of iron hydroxide and hydrocarbons that dot the landscape (usually salted with other metal ores and coal)*, refining the polymerised gunk into useful chemicals and refining the iron hydroxide and other ores into metal.

The simple form of life that thrived in our methane and ammonia atmosphere polluted themselves nearly out of existence with a poisonous gunk we call oxygen and lost their place as dominant lifeform. That's just one of many mass extinctions this planet has seen - some through overpopulation, some through suspected comet strike - ours won't be the last mass extinction on this planet. Earth is indifferent to us as a species, there are lots more variations on this "life" thing to play out.



*The quicker on the uptake will have already worked out that I'm referring to what a landfill of assorted metal and wooden junk and discarded plastic is likely to look like a few million years down the track.

Phew!
Well that sure takes the pressure off and eases the mind!
We and our pollutin' ways are just part of the natural cycle after all.

[Edbear]

Yes. They have to use kayaks and harforks.

Mmmm! Maybe the Japanese whalers should be sent into the Southern Ocean in Kayaks, too!

[Winston001]

Yes. They have to use kayaks and harforks.

NO NO! You cannot have your kayak and heat it.

[slowpoke]

Hmmm, interesting thread with some reasoned debate (*shock!* *horror!*).

It all depends on the TYPE of issue you view whaling as. Deciding what sort of issue whaling is, is a determanitive factor in the outcome.

Political and sovereignty issue as advanced by Mr Hitcher, indeed.

Conservation issue, yes indeed.

There was even some skirting around the 'animal rights' issues - this is where it gets interesting IMHO.

All of the other issues philosophically relate to the human perspective. The primary consideration is the human values concerned. Looking at the suffering of the whale being killed is straying into the animal welfare field if you think it's OK to kill whales; or into the animal rights field if you think that whales should be free from predation by humans.

This starts to open the philosophical can of worms that is human treatment of animals in general. There are all sorts of HUMAN justifications as to why it is OK for humans to treat some animals in one way that would not be acceptable if it were a different species.

Taking food from natural stocks in the ocean is extremely ecologically dodgy at the best of times. Whales happen to be more scarce than most other oceanic 'food' species. BUt humans tend to ascribe a 'special' status to whales that we do not to other aquatic animals. Why is that? Surely there is no logical basis for suggesting that whales deserve special protection? Where should we draw the line? Should whales have the 'right' not to be hunted to extinction?

Current regimes governing our relationship with animals we share the planet with are entirely anthrocentric - they protect 'cute, furry animals' that humans like. While the species differ from culture to culture, the tenuous intellectual justifications for distinguishing between species do not.

If whales are special, in terms of what they think and feel, surely other animals possess thoughts and emotions we should consider before exploiting them. Such thinking would be a little uncomfortable for most to do more than scratch the surface of the suffering meted out to further human whims. The exception is that suffering which is meted out to 'cute and furry' animals (and is hence unacceptable).

Humans should be looking to throttle back our dependance on animal exploitation per se, whales are just an interesting example of an animal humans feel a special affinity with.

Animal rights rant over, normal hippy-bashing may resume.

Yep, very well articulated, there are some very interesting contradictions involved with this debate.

[Phurrball]

Aw - and I was beginning to think that everyone thought I was a raving lunatic and was ignoring me in the hope that I'd go back to my internet-less hovel in Laingholm and morris dance with the other hippies! (Blame a paper I took last semester for these dangerous, radical hippie ideas)

The biggie (leaving aside the geo-political, cultural and ecological arguments)is that a roaming whale is something potentially capable of ownership like all animals at law (bling to anyone that can name a country where animals are not part of the property paradigm - I'm not aware of any.)

'We' (and I use that very generally) tend to elevate whales, dogs, cats, kiwi etc to special statuses for various reasons, believing them above 'other' animals, and imagine them to be 'ring-fenced' by pseudo-rights that make them off limits to the usual treatment meted out to animals that fall short in human judgment.

The philospohical and logical bases for these arguments don't stand up to close scrutiny - our treatment of animals is arbitrary, and immutably linked to the fact that they are capable of ownership (cf slaves in the antebellum US - there could be no real rights while slaves were owned)

While animals are capable of being 'owned', they can only be achieve status according to human whims (Whales and primates are 'special'; cats and dogs are accorded family status if they're lucky)

My dangerous, radical thinking is that until animals are something other than property, there can be no true protection for any given species (the academics vary on how we should proceed, to which animals basic 'rights'). NZ has given some very basic 'rights' to non-human primates, and this has formed a precedent for other jurisdictions to grant limited 'rights' to some animals. Try getting international agreement on that one! Like the legal abolition of slavery (let's not forget it still exists), it'll take a while.

My thinking may be way out there, but in deeds I am an incrementalist and believe everyone must come to these decisions in their own time (hell, I'm only a vegetarian, not even a vegan!)

Over and out for rant number 2 - If I've made one person muse a while on our relationship with animals, I've achieved something.

Ross.