Our Priorities as Advocates for Cetaceans

I want there to do absolutely no doubt about what matters to us most, and therefore why we do what we do.  Often times, we at CCA endorse actions which we agree are entirely ethically right, and worthwhile for their own sake, but nevertheless don’t come close to being the real reason they are truly valuable.  For us, there’s always a much bigger motive at play.  I want to state that for the record here.

First, to one of those worthy actions currently underway, this one involving Action for Dolphins, in my view an exceptional organization that’s been effectively fighting for dolphins for years.  Recently, AFD launched a criminal complaint to attempt to stop the sale of dolphin meat in Japan.  This meat is sold to consumers who are often unaware that it contains levels of mercury that far exceed what their own government’s regulations currently allow.  We’re talking up to 12X more.  It’s widely known that exposure to even minute levels of mercury risks damaging a person’s kidneys, thyroid and lungs.  Higher levels will be fatal.  In the case of Japan, this meat is even provided to kids for their school lunches.

Given that all the preliminary research indicates that the levels found in dolphin meat are far above currently mandated minimums, the case is pretty solid that the sale of this product breaks Japanese law.  Then, when you demonstrate the sheer brutality of the slaughters, which orgs like AFD, Ric O’Barry’s Dolphin Project, and Japan’s own Life Investigation Agency do convincingly on a daily basis, well you’ve got yourself an effective campaign.  

The track record of these organizations has in the past demonstrated that they possess a good understanding of human psychology and what motivates people to act.  (AFD’s well co-ordinated, and ultimately successful legal & social media campaign to force WAZA to take it’s own regulations seriously proves this).  Here we have another good example.  Tie in to the cruelty of the trade, and you get people wondering why we would do things so indescribably horrible in order to put tainted meat on supermarket shelves.  Continuing to do so makes no sense, and in time I expect Japanese authorities will see that.

I applaud this campaign by AFD.  It’s well conceived, and it has a good chance of working.  And it could save thousands of precious lives in just the next few years. 

But let’s be clear what we’re talking about here.  The health of Japanese school kids is fundamentally and critically important.  Obviously.  By itself, this is an excellent and obvious reason to end the hunts.  But let’s assume that years from now we’ve managed to clean up our act, and the oceans are now healthy and vibrant.  Pollutants have been taken out of the food chain, and apex predators no longer accumulate things like mercury in their body tissues.  In effect, dolphin meat would once again be ‘safe to eat’.  What happens now?

Well, in anticipation of that, here’s another excellent reason, all by itself, to end the hunts.  This sentence from AFD’s campaign is well crafted from the perspective of putting together a successful PR strategy.  “In order to understand why I’m so desperate to end this cruel trade, you need to understand how dolphins end up on supermarket shelves.”  They then cite a recent example of a pod (pilot whales in this instance) being driven for seven hours before being trapped in the cove for three days.  At the end of which most of the pod is slaughtered as they huddle together, starving and exhausted.  Those who are left alive are driven back out to sea, but as is typical, these include young members.  It’s believed that the hunters don’t want these young dolphins, with their smaller bodies, to count against the kill quotas.  Without their mothers, their chance of survival is essentially zero.

This description of cruelty and the unimaginable callousness of the hunters is factually accurate, and is sure to evoke some level of empathy in most people who happen to read it.   And that’s not even getting into the killing methods, which would be illegal if applied to any mammal in a Japanese slaughterhouse.  This is frankly sickening and needs to end.  It’s the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night.

OK, so let’s now ask the same question.  Let’s say we’ve not only made dolphin meat safe to eat, we’ve also found completely painless ways to kill them.  I can’t imagine how we’d do that, but let’s assume that we find a way.  So we good now?  

Not even close.  
 
Let’s keep going.  Compelling campaigns have been and continue to be put together around the fact that whaling and dolphin drive hunts are unsustainable.  Many species of cetaceans are classified as endangered or even critically endangered.  A couple are already listed as ‘functionally extinct’.  The presence of whales is critical to the maintenance of healthy ecosystems, and to our collective battle against climate change.  So to take an example, when someone manages to convince decision makers over at CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) to halt the movement of captive dolphins across international borders, they will have done a very good thing indeed.

So we can add one more to a growing list of great reasons why dolphins and whales should not die at human hands.  But let’s say we’ve one day improved the state of our biosphere, to the point that cetacean populations are healthy and thriving.  In economic terms, we’d have an abundance of dolphins, and hunting them would be entirely ‘sustainable’.  We good now?

No.

Let’s look ahead to a time in the future, one where much has changed.  Activists have presented all kinds of excellent and compelling reasons to stop slaughtering whales and dolphins – both practical and moral.  Perhaps it will turn out that we were clever enough to manage to overcome all of them.  All of them, that is, but one. 

Back to the present – whether it’s hidden under the tarps at Taiji, or out in the open on the beaches of the Faroe Islands.  What is it that makes these killing places so horrific for their victims?  The killing methods are anything but quick and painless as claimed by the Faroese, but forget that for a moment.  There is zero doubt in my mind that the worst of it for a being of a dolphin’s nature and intelligence is the same as it would be for you or me.  It’s being surrounded by your loved ones as the killing proceeds, hearing their cries and knowing what comes next.  It’s struggling on the sand and rocks in shallow waters as the bay fills the blood of the rest of your pod.  It’s knowing that you can do nothing to protect others with whom you share intense social bonds.  The feeling of being powerless against what comes next.  

I suggest to you that there is no technological innovation that could overcome this fundamental truth.  A dolphin is not an animal that can be killed without the infliction of enormous emotional pain and suffering.  Its nature and intelligence renders the prospect of a ‘humane’ kill preposterous.  You could just as easily define such a method of operation for the death camps at Treblinka.  Even attempting to do so would not only be crazy, but unspeakably immoral.  

OK, so when it comes to a campaign such as ending the sale of toxic dolphin meat, I grant that it’s something we need to do – because it’s the right thing to do.  But we need to be very careful what we’re talking about.  

There are a great many perfectly valid justifications for ending the hunting, killing and capture of cetaceans.  We run the risk of driving them to extinction.  People, including Japanese school kids, are being poisoned and possibly irreparably harmed.  We cause pain and suffering that most people don’t find tolerable when inflicted on other mammals (including Japanese lawmakers, ironically).  However, even after all that, it’s essential that at the centre of our contemplations of this issue is a recognition of the nature and essence of these particular animals.  

It is CCA’s position that cetaceans are beings worthy of personhood in their own right.  Given that, killing them remains wrong even if there were an abundance of them in the sea.  Even if we could eliminate the mercury and other toxins that accumulate in their bodies, thus making them safe for humans to eat.  And even in the exceptionally unlikely event that we could find a physically painless way to kill them.  What we’re talking about here is depriving of its life an animal which is capable of complex reasoning and long range planning.  Which experiences loss as we do.  Love for other members of its pod, and profound grief when they die.  Which demonstrates extreme distress when separated from those others and held in captivity.  

Their essential nature is the one factor we’ll never change.  At the end of the day, they are persons like we are.  Every bit as entitled to their lives and liberty as we are.

Human history has been a steady progression against the idea that any one group has bestowed upon it the inherent privilege of dominating over every other.  It’s the story of the inexorable fall of bad ideas as we slowly, painfully, but inevitably march towards a society which can call itself mature, sophisticated – just.  There is no manifest destiny for whites, or for males, or heterosexuals, or Christians or even for humans.  Putting the infancy of our species behind us and into the history books will require us to accord a level of respect and dignity to certain other species.  Morality demands it of us, and there is no better example of this than with dolphins. 

I wanted there to be no uncertainty about where CCA stands on this.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Phil, Canadian Cetacean Alliance