Whale of a time

Why would anyone want to eat a whale?

It's easy to have the thought. But you can easily imagine aliens arriving on Earth and being horrified by our eating other species. "They eat cows. And those adorable piggies," Zog will cry. Perhaps the aliens will set up a global farming commission, and we will have to pretend that we are raising cows for scientific reasons, as the Japanese do whales.

It is whale-watching season here. Humpbacks swim up towards the tropics to breed, and return later in the year. At Hervey Bay, they rest, and the viewing is nonpareil. I have been six feet from a whale, and while it's not quite a spiritual experience, it does touch something inside you.

The prohibition on eating them is based largely in their being intelligent, and consequently, like us. Sliminess or creepiness aside, we generally have taboos on eating things that we feel are like us: the more so, the more we oppose their being eaten. (This doesn't apply to horses, which are no more like us than cows, and a damned sight less intelligent than a pig. I suppose we do not eat them because we once had a culture that depended on them for transport and haulage, although the same is true for the French, and they will have them hoof and hide, so long as they are served with a creamy sauce. And dogs are not eaten where they are pets. As for cats... they are not generally eaten. One supposes this is because they are so sinister. They do not make good enough eating to merit the fear of their ghosts' returning to claw you to scraps.)

So we find the eating of monkeys thoroughly unacceptable, and bears rather distasteful. Dolphins are out.

Some animal rightists extend this to all animal species. They suggest we should not eat them (or use them in any way as property) because it is "speciesist". It's apparently not speciesist to eat potatoes. Potatoes don't have faces after all, and don't make squealing noises when you put them to death. The argument of Gary Francione et al is that potatoes don't feel pain -- their definition of sentience, which is their distinguishing feature for the inedible, is "able to feel pain" -- but how do they know? Potatoes do not express pain but can we be certain that's the same thing as not feeling it?

And are fish a borderline case? How do you know what a fish feels? Many piscatarians that I know say they eat fish because they're "not really animals". That shows a lamentable grasp of biology, but the sense is clear enough. Fish don't generally make noises. (Can it be coincidental that the swimming things that resemble fish that we don't eat "sing" and communicate verbally?) They don't have legs. They cannot gambol.

I am a vegetarian. For me, it's not a case of avoiding speciesism so much as of distaste for eating animals: a grand squeamishness if you like. I do not disapprove of meat-eating where it is a question of survival. But in civilised societies such as ours, eating meat seems somehow savage, degraded, a thing we should rise above.

At least, I thought that way when I gave up sausages. These days it's more that meat turns my stomach. I have conflicting feelings about eating it. I was never a proselytiser anyway. Live and let murder is much more my thing.

I never liked seafood anyway and I find the idea of eating a whale repellent. I feel the same about horses, mind you. I can't imagine wanting to. But I have to ask myself, if they were sustainably fished (whales, not horses), what would be the problem? The answer is clear though. They have been fished to near extinction. Humpbacks are endangered. The Japanese could be allowed a couple of hundred a year, maybe, yes. If the population were growing by sufficient numbers, that would be okay, surely? How could we allow squeamishness to overcome their right to eat blubber? (In other places, whaling is permitted on a very limited scale. Inuit fish for whale, I believe, although very few these days.)

But there are two insurmountable problems. First, that the populations of these whales are very close to a tipping point. All species have a point where they are doomed. Without the intervention of man, with structured breeding programmes and so on, they are going to become extinct. It's clear enough why this should be -- all species have attrition rates; all lose so many of their young each year; all have death rates of such and such, and only so much surplus of births over deaths in the first place. And many of the population cannot successfully breed: they are too old or cannot for other reasons produce viable offspring. With animals that have low rates of attrition from natural causes, such as whales, the number can be quite low, so that those who want to whale can say, yes, there are relatively few, but that is sustainable because you only need a few. The problem then is that the margin between survival and extinction is very small, and any mistake or cheating can be very dangerous.

Second, and most important, is that no system of licensing will prevent poaching. It probably happens now. Naturally, when we are all united in saying no to whaling, we know that anyone who is catching whales (bar the Japanese "scientific" quota) is poaching and can be stopped. But when there is some whaling allowed, it will become hard to police. If whalers are licensed, they will need to be carefully monitored to make sure they are sticking to their quotas. Where is the motivation for those nations who do not think whaling should be so heavily restricted to do that careful work?

The cost of the Japanese love of whalemeat will quite possibly be borne by my grandchildren or their children. They may watch the last few humpbacks swimming past Straddie, their numbers slowly dwindling to nothing, until there are none outside aquaria, the last lonely whales on a planet that once had an abundance.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:56 am