Like many of you, dear readers, I have to turn away from the tv when they show images of whale hunts, the cannon firing its vicious harpoon, the blood swirling in the water, the tail thrashing in agony. I imagine the pain and fear and desperation running through the whale brain before the animal is then sliced up alive on the deck of the ship.
The International Whaling Commission has just finished its annual meeting, in Alaska this time (better see it quick before all the ice melts I suppose was the logic). Instead of making me hate the Japanese government more, this time, it caused in me an immediate hatred for the government of St Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. Hell, before the IWC meeting I'm not sure I even knew the country was called St Vincent and the Grenadines, but now they are top of my list of hated governments along with Japan, Iceland and Norway (oh and Burma and Zimbabwe, but those are other stories). And the Grenadinians have joined my list of least favorite indigenous people beside the Greenlanders and the Inuit of Alaska and Siberia.
Sure, I still have very strong feelings about Japan (whose smooth, urbane, apparently civilized chief negotiator is a classic example of the banality of evil), but now St Vincent (and the Grenadinians of the Grenadines) has knocked it off top spot. The reason? A consensus vote at the IWC meeting has cleared the Caribbean nation to kill four humpback whales a year over a five-year period, as part of its 'subsistence whaling quota.' Mind you it was still a toss-up in the Alaskan Idol competition with the man from the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, Nukapigak, saying he cannot imagine life without the bowhead whale on the table -- "It would be like taking part of my culture away," he said. "It's a tradition that has been passed on to us for thousands of years." They are going to kill, blood swirling in the water, 260 tails thrashing in agony, 260 bowhead whales over the next 5 years, these Alaskan Inuit, who consider harvesting whales 'a sacred accomplishment'. So, a close call, but St Vincent and the Grenadines (where you can have 'eco-adventures' in the 'Jewels of the Caribbean'), with a really phony claim to a vicious traditional habit that they want to 'continue', has just beaten them.
Look, I know these are relatively small numbers compared to the thousands slaughtered by the big three of whaling. And I know we are supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy about the continuation of ancient traditions by these wonderful indigenous peoples, and this is the feeling the IWC had when they were asked to condone these grotesque traditions, but I don't. There is no difference between this kind of nonsense and what Japan, Iceland and Norway are doing. Indeed Japan tried to claim 'community whaling' status so that coastal towns in Japan could slaughter even more whales under the pretense of ancient tradition, and was knocked back, but the whale slaughter program of these three primitive nations (have I mentioned that they are Japan, Iceland and Norway?) is based on the alibi of tradition.
I don't know what evidence there is for length of whaling tradition in Japan, Iceland and Norway, although I have seen it suggested that in Japan whale meat only really began to be eaten much at the end of the Second World War when food was scarce. There is no evidence on the Caribbean, and little in Alaska ('thousands of years' is just what you say when you have no idea), and Greenland can't have a tradition more than about 250 years old at most.
But let us leave the world of reality for a moment. Let us say that all these groups really could provide documented evidence of a history of whaling going back, oh, I don't know, 'hundreds of years'. So what? Other countries, America, Britain, Australia, also had long whaling traditions, but gave them up and have felt none the worse for the experience. And countries everywhere give up all kinds of traditions with long histories - animals and Christians are no longer slaughtered in the Colosseum for example, and rebels and thieves don't get crucified; children don't get stuck in chimneys; women in western countries no longer wear burkas. The Danes don't drown criminals in bogs; the British gave up bear baiting and cock fighting and have just given up fox hunting; American women did eventually get the vote; the Russian aristocrats don't kill peasants from horseback; Guantanamo doesn't hang, draw and quarter people, nor even torture them (What? Oh, ok. But being hung drawn and quartered has gone, right?); Slavery is pretty well abolished (in spite of claims that it was traditional, biblical, and was essential to the economies of both Britain and America); India has almost stopped burning widows alive, and the caste system only has another few hundred years to run; the French don't have kings any more; people don't have their hearts ripped from their living bodies on the tops of pyramids in Mexico; Pharaohs don't get buried in the bottom of pyramids in Egypt; well-regulated militias no longer get armed in America; un-regulated militias now get armed in Iraq; Swedes and Norwegians and Danes no longer set out on boats to ravage and pillage the shores of England; the Chinese no longer bind women's feet; Samurai warriors no longer prowl Tokyo streets; and pirate ships no longer roam the Caribbean (What? No, I meant real pirate ships). And the practice of pouring CO2 into the air might be a 250 year old tradition but it also has to stop. Very soon.
See stuff happens, for a while, in even the best of countries. And everyone thinks it will go on happening for ever, and then the stuff stops happening, for all kinds of good reasons. And the world doesn't end, the economy doesn't collapse, people find that there are other things to do in civilized countries, that life goes on. And we look back in horror now at what our ancestors did, what other people's ancestors did, and we are grateful, by and large, that we live in the year 2007, not 1007, or 007. So why, when it comes to whaling, do well-intentioned people avert their eyes, shuffle their feet, and give approval to the barbaric killing of whales in the Caribbean (some eco-adventure, eh?), Greenland, Alaska and Siberia? And why do we pay lip serve to the idea that commercial-level whaling by the big three is at least partly justified by tradition? Why out of all the uncivilized things that civilized people once did in the last few thousand years do we allow this one to continue?
There are things that have to stop because we can no longer afford on-going attacks on the environment. And there are things that have to stop because they are bad for the collective soul of human kind. And there are things that have to stop because we have to start somewhere in learning to live with all our cousins in the animal world, and if we can't start with whales where on earth could we possibly start? And there are things that have to stop because they turn the stomachs of civilized people in 2007.
Shelley said 'The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox hunters'. If you think, and read, come and see what I write at The Watermelon Blog. If you are a fox hunter, or a whale hunter, best stay away.