Wired: Slaughtering Whales As an Expression of National Culture

[Guest guest]

Send your letter of support and thanks to Wired magazine for this month's Luddite column...

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/theluddite/2007/12/luddite_1206

 

Slaughtering Whales As an Expression of National Culture

Call me Insensitive.

Call me anything you like, but it needs to be said and I'm going to

say it: The Japanese whaling industry should be ashamed for using the

"cultural tradition" argument as a justification for carrying on its

barbaric practice.

As you read this, a Japanese fleet is scouring the Southern Ocean

for whales, lots of them. After years of being restrained by

international treaty to killing a few whales under the flimsy pretext

of "scientific research," the fleet plans to cut loose this season.

More than 2,000 whales are being "harvested," including up to 50

humpbacks, a protected species that was hunted nearly to extinction by

the mid-20th century.

If you listen to the Japanese government and the whaling industry lobby

it serves, whales are plentiful and, besides, whalers are merely

exercising a cultural prerogative. Sure. It's kind of like origami or

flower arranging, only you use an explosive charge packed into a

harpoon tip. In playing the culture card Japan joins Norway, another pro-whaling

nation that would love to take its harpoons back to sea. If anything,

the Norwegian argument is even weaker

than Japan's. When you consider the sweep of history, the United

States, now firmly entrenched as an anti-whaling nation, has a stronger

tradition of deep-water whaling than either of those countries. Of course, using the word "culture" is a smokescreen anyway. This

isn't about culture. Like almost everything else in the world that

stains the human spirit, this is about greed. Whaling, as practiced by the nation-states, has always been a purely

commercial venture. In the Age of Sail the industry grew out of

economic necessity. When a whale was killed all of it was used -- as

food, as lamp oil, as lubricant. Whalebone was used to make corset

stays and scrimshaw. Blubber was used to make soap and cosmetics. A

single whale -- remember, we're talking about the largest animal on

earth -- could produce a lot of stuff and that meant a lot of money.

It had to be lucrative. There was no other reason for men to

willingly spend months at sea in miserable conditions and dreadful

weather for the chance of catching a few whales. Of course, they hunted

from open boats in those day, too, using standard harpoons, so the most

advanced technology of the day wasn't really very advanced, limiting

their catch and increasing their peril. But that was then. Excepting a few indigenous settlements here and

there, where local hunting using traditional methods is still

practiced, whale meat is no longer a dietary staple, and whale oil

hasn't fueled any lamps in well over a century. There is no byproduct

taken from a whale that can't be made or obtained by other means. In other words, any whale being killed in the open ocean today is

being killed for absolutely no good reason at all. Whaling is an

obsolete industry, serving no one, which only makes the cruelty of the killing that much more repulsive. Yet the Japanese have a large, modern whaling fleet tied up in

Shimonoseki, a port on the southern tip of Honshu, and they're

determined to use it. It's a fleet that has no reason to exist; the

ships should be mothballed or converted to other uses. But try telling

that to those who make their living from killing whales. So the ships continue going out. For a while the hunts were

conducted in the name of scientific research, mainly because of a

loophole in the whaling ban -- written into the treaty as a sop to the

whaling nations -- that allows for a small number of kills for this

purpose. Japan still uses that excuse. The stated reason behind the intention

of killing 50 humpbacks is to measure the whale's pregnancy rates as

part of a larger study of the Antarctic ecosystem. Pure bilge water, an

old salt might say. But more and more the Japanese are turning to the cultural-tradition

defense, a blatant if clumsy attempt to portray themselves as the

victims of cultural prejudice. That, too, is bilge water. This is no

time for the world to cave in to some misguided sense of political

correctness. On the contrary, pressure should be applied to stop. If

Japan won't stop, a boycott of Japanese goods would not be unreasonable. Incidentally, as Japanese cultural traditions go, I'll take the tea ceremony.

- - -

Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.

 

 

Joy Vidheecharoen-Glatz, R.Ph.