Whaling, Whaling, Over the Ocean Blue!

I’ve recently become aware of a Facebook group called “F*** OFF JAPAN… LEAVE THE WHALES ALONE.” This strikes me an as unusually rude (and frankly ineffectual) try at conservationism.

I’m a bit ambivalent towards whaling. Mostly because I’ve eaten whale and am not particularly enamoured of its “fish-beef” flavor. Imagine roast beef that’s gone off. They sell whale all over the place in Norway and Norwegians have a fairly active whaling industry. According to Wikipedia, Norway kills about 600 a year. Mostly they hunt Minke whales, which are pretty small for whales, but still huge. There is a skull of a minke whale in the basement of the Stavanger museum that is longer than I am tall, still drooping with dried out baleen.

It does occur to me that since each animal is basically school bus sized, you could potentially feed a lot of people with the death of a single animal. They are also not endangered. Because of its rarity, whale meat is fairly expensive and I imagine a lot of people earn a decent living off the lives of a relatively small amount of animals. This is a marked difference to, say, chickens. One large chicken feeds about 5 people so when you add up all those Sunday dinners, it’s at the cost of quite a number of animal lives.

On the other hand, whales have near human length life spans and long gestation and parenting phases. With animals that live so long, it can be difficult to correctly interpret conservation numbers. At the moment, Norway is still well within the quota of whales it can hunt, but I imagine the data can be pretty tricky to collect.

So it’s definitely not the debate over whether whaling is a good idea or not to which I object, it’s the general disinterest in information over emotion.

For instance, a few years ago MTV had an ad for Europe that showed a CGI mother and baby hump backed whale playfully frolicking while whistling Enya. Then it flipped to black with the slogan “NORWAY IS WHALING AGAIN!” I don’t think anyone hunts humpbacks, certainly not Norway, and hunting a mother with calves is a bad economic idea. It’s just a good use of sentimentality.

When I was in college, I was on the bus listening to a particular inane conversation between two classmates. It went something like this:

“Eww!! I hate lobsters! They’re like giant bugs.”

“Yeah! I don’t know how anyone can eat anything that ugly. Like big ugly bugs.”

“Yeah, but like cows are cute. I don’t want to eat them either.”

“Yeah, but like chickens are okay.”

“Yeah.”

Apparently, there’s a minimum and maximum level of acceptable attractiveness for edible animals. Despite the fact that crustaceans and mollusks are plentiful, nutritious, and of minimum intelligence they aren’t cute enough to eat. Cows are too attractive, so you can’t eat them either. I can’t quite figure out how other commonly eaten animals rank in this system. Presumably rabbit is too adorable, but what about sheep? I know snails are too ugly, but how about pigs?

I guess I just get annoyed at superficial opinions.