Slaughtering Whales As an Expression of National Culture
godpt3
Posts: 1,020
Tony Long Email 12.06.07 | 12:00 AM
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.
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.
"If all those sweet, young things were laid end to end, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised."
—Dorothy Parker
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/6902/conspiracytheoriesxt6qt8.jpg
—Dorothy Parker
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/6902/conspiracytheoriesxt6qt8.jpg
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take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
If they must use the cultural argeement, then they need to hunt the whales with sailing ships, row boats, and manually fashioned harpoons.....no factory ships.
—Dorothy Parker
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/6902/conspiracytheoriesxt6qt8.jpg
... and the primitive African countries that practice "female genital mutilation" :(
—Dorothy Parker
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/6902/conspiracytheoriesxt6qt8.jpg