Norway has announced its whale quota for 2008 and plans to hunt over a thousand minke whales.
Norway’s Fisheries Ministry said that the quota has remained unchanged from last year. Though it includes 97 whales that were not caught during previous whaling seasons.
The majority of the whales will be taken from the coastal areas around the Barents Sea, Svalbard and the North Sea.
Whaling in recent years has been adversely affected by bad weather conditions and rising prices of fuel. In particular, the waters of north-eastern Iceland, around the island of Jan Mayen, have proven difficult for whaling operations.
There are seven kinds of great whales, among which the minke are the smallest. The government of Norway fears that without whaling, the minke whale population’s growth could adversely affect fish stocks in the region.
“The total stock size of central and north Atlantic minke whales is close to 70,000 animals, of which around 43,600 are in Icelandic coastal waters,” said a statement from the government. “The catches are clearly sustainable and therefore consistent with the principle of sustainable development.”
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I read this poem on the Internet written by A. Viirlaid of Toronto.
It made me think there has to be a better way for us to coexist with other life on our planet Earth.
My reaction follows below the poem.
Mother Whale’s Lament
?? ? ?
I cry for our shared grace
I cry for your human family
I cry for your whaler’s family
I cry for my family
I cry for me
With your warm hand you could stroke my skin like so many of your family have chosen to do
You would feel my warmth and gratitude
Why do you touch me only with your cold harpoon as you thrust it into my flesh?
I thought after so much killing that we would both crave harmony
That we had learned that we both feel and love
That we both treasure life
That we revere our comrades
That we embrace our children
That we share the same blood of our ancestors
That our hearts both beat the rhyme of life
How my child will cling to me as you haul my dying carcass out of the sea
How she will cry
Until you kill her too
A.Viirlaid, Toronto
The Human Condition
Nature and Our Paradoxical Dilemma
Taking Life to Live
I believe this whale hunt is utterly unnecessary, mindlessly cruel, deeply hypocritical, and an activity not worthy of modern humankind nor especially of the Norwegian and Japanese people who are culturally and economically advanced peoples.
The Whale Hunters of today are not the same people as those who scraped a living out of the wilderness during the Stone Age. They are not starving. They do not today live in a disadvantaged situation when compared to the many poor peoples of other nations.
So there is little substance in any nutritional argument for killing whales. There is even less in the cultural argument. Also one cannot justify the current killing with the “scientific study” argument — it is easier to prove that guns and tasers don’t kill people, than to try and prove that we have to kill whales in order to study them.
Cultures and people move forward. They advance. Values and our common cultural mentalities progress. Hopefully our humanity strengthens. And customs evolve. These things are not frozen in time. Like an individual who occasionally manifests irrationality, societies too can be unbalanced in some of their customs or practices. They can both mature and grow beyond the behaviors that indicate an alienation from their true long-term natures.
Retaining worthwhile and revered ancient customs is praiseworthy. But, for illustration, if the Japanese of ancient times, and sometimes not so ancient times, never took prisoners alive during wartime because of the prevailing Japanese Samurai “culture”, does that mean that such a particular practice is something to be retained with pride today? Using the modern sword (?) against defenseless whales is equally dishonorable.
Any appeal to ancient customs is thus especially absurd in the whale hunt discussion. Did the Japanese in ancient times use steel-hulled ships to journey to Antarctica to hunt with steel harpoons and explosives for whales?
Can we condone what is being done by any of the arguments presented so far? This is all doublespeak. These arguments are not even up to the pathetic standards of crooked politicians who lie when trying to justify their corrupt behavior.
If tribal customs for aboriginal peoples in some parts of the world are used to appeal for the allowance of hunting or fishing of protected species out of season then it is true, the local lawmakers will often grant exceptions in such cases. But these should only be granted if the indigenous peoples are willing to use their forebears’ (??) ancient technologies. That would protect the species in question since ancient methods are much less likely to have the mass killing effect of our modern methods. More importantly it would give true meaning to the phrase “retention of valued ancient customs”.
How much more profound would it be for a young man coming of age to perform an ancient rite or ritual with the ancient methods, like fishing with spears rather than with drift nets 100 km in length? With the introduction of a highly sophisticated technology, ancient customs can — in this new and different context — assume a completely new and different nature and hence become unjustifiable on the basis of any appeal to “tradition”.
The right to carry forward with a tradition implies that the traditional methodology, as much as practical, should be used — naturally with the provision that if the ancient method involved taking your enemy’s head off, then we abstain from that part of the tradition with the understanding that we have moved forward from that point in our common development.
Our purpose today should be to protect and serve life. Whereas our primordial instinct for self-preservation through the ‘harvesting’ of animal life served us well and allowed us to survive as a species, that same instinct is no longer appropriate — it does us a disservice. It takes our identity away from us. It can today jeopardize our primary motivation for living, the celebration of life itself.
Henry David Thoreau wrote “In wildness is the preservation of the world”. Today that wildness preserves us more than ever. But we don’t serve it nor does it preserve us by our ‘harvesting’ of the great whales. The wilderness preserves us through our conservation of those great creatures and through our preservation of their environment.
Those Japanese and Norwegians who actively hunt whales may delude themselves into thinking that they are in touch with the past, with their primordial selves. But what they are in touch with is what all of our forebears (??) were compelled to do in order to survive. But precisely because such activities are no longer germane to our survival, they needlessly alienate us from our potential — our true loving human character. Early humans had no choice — we do.
Today when so-called primitive tribes hunt for food, they invariably practice a form of prayer and a showing of gratitude to Nature for the gift they have just received. There is an inherent paradox they recognize explicitly. And they must atone for the taking of Nature’s gift of life in order to keep themselves psychologically whole. Otherwise they would have to coexist with unacknowledged hypocrisy.
They have extinguished the lives of others. They have killed to preserve and ensure their own continuance. Without the proper atonement and acknowledgement of the wrong that has been done, they risk becoming mentally unwhole and eventually physically unwell. But when was the last time you saw a whaler give thanks to God or more to the point to the whale whose vibrant life he has just ended?
The Japanese and the Norwegians and their compatriots in other nations are worthy of something more sublime than the needless slaughter of their fellow mammals in the oceans. These nations prove this every day in all of their other activities. Why not do the same with a permanent cessation of whaling?
We don’t own the whales. They were born free. We did not raise them for food. We have no more right to organize in societal groups to hunt them down with modern technology than they would have that right to organize and hunt us. Because we can do so is not sufficient reason for so doing.
As far as our concern for our fellow humans, there is no contradiction in helping helpless animals as well as helping our fellow humans who are in need or in danger. There is no mutual exclusivity in pursuing both such noble activities. Admirably, both Japan and Norway give very generously to foreign aid. We as individuals should similarly respect all life.
Even if we raise life on the farm for eventual human consumption it should be done with care and respect for those creatures we raise. There is sacredness in all life, even most especially our own, which it is true, we do not always recognize. When we mistreat so-called animal life we are not respecting their sacredness or our own. By so doing, we diminish ourselves and disavow our own sacred nature.
The respect for every human and animal life is an essential precondition if worthwhile societal life is to ever be possible for all of us on our Home Earth. When our collective conscience loses respect for Life as something incredibly sacred, and as something worthy of all of our protection, we inevitably end by disunifying our own identities and repudiating our own most basic reason for living.
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