The appalling whalers are coming back. 'Scientific whaling' has only seen the slaughter of whales in their thousands, and the blood lust of whaling companies is not satisfied with that. They have bribed and pressured small countries to join the whaling commission, and seem assured, at their meeting this week, of getting more whales hunted.
"We think there is growing support for whaling in principle and in practice," said Norway's High North Alliance secretary Rune Frovik. "we think that you can't find anything more environmentally friendly than whale meat - this is an animal which lived in nature, we are harvesting nature's surplus and you don't have to destroy nature to do that." But before we express outrage (and we should) against the push by the whaling nations, we should recognise that the slaughter of whales is taking place against a background of wildlife killing by all countries. Everywhere around the world assaults on animals are direct and brutal, with species such as bears and great apes and tigers and elephants as well as whales and dolphins being cruelly slaughtered. When there are people so removed from the natural world that they can't even empathise with a great ape, or see the beauty of a tiger, or marvel at the intelligence of a dolphin, there is no hope for saving the species more distantly related to us or less attractive. There is no excuse now for killing any wild animal.
There are people in western agricultural societies who seem to think that hunting is the highest expression of manhood, and that killing wild animals is the mark of a civilised society. Other men seem to need to get the penis bones of tigers, or the horns of rhinoceros, to, they believe incorrectly, make their own penis bigger. All over the world, instead of being satisfied with farm sectors that can produce all the food that people need (distribution, finance, and political will are different issues) while leaving wilderness untouched to try to maintain some biodiversity to keep the biological world functioning, men with weapons of mass destruction are killing whales, kangaroos, rhinoceros, small birds, large birds, deer, tigers, great apes, crocodiles, sharks, game fish, small fish, bears, wolves, and many other species. Tribal people before agriculture had no choice but to hunt, but they did so carefully for their immediate food needs. There was no trophy hunting, no showing off lines of quail on the ground, or shark's jaws, or deer antlers, or ostentatiously eating whale hamburgers, or feeding kangaroos to dogs. They didn't kill excessively, and they didn't kill for sport, and they didn't kill because they had doubts about their manhood which only killing could relieve. All over the world we need to call a halt to killing wild animals of all kinds. Farming societies had taken over every continent by the late eighteenth century. Two hundred years later the slaughter of wild species must stop. There are so many other pressures on the environment, that a pressure that arises only from the egos of a few men who have not grown up is one we could do without.