The "part of our cultural heritage" excuse is not a positive argument, as many cultures have some pretty horrible practices in their heritage.
In fact, some cultures were successful colonists. Should they be allowed to capture the Faroe islands and enslave the locals under the guise of "cultural heritage"?
Times change, and human society on the whole must change. Cultures that refuse to change can and sometimes should be cut off from the rest of society. How well would they handle being isolated by the rest of the world, with no commerce or outside support? I suspect they would suddenly decide to leave some practices in the past.
Well, every year in the US 121 million pigs are slaughtered, and they obviously live under much worse conditions. The Faroe Islands have 50000 inhabitants, so even if they did this every year it wouldn't really be very significant.
It looks graphical, but if they eat them, which I understand that they do, what is really the problem?
Just to add context: A common dolphin weights around 150 Kg, a bottlenose dolphin around 400 Kg. Most of those dolphins are pilot whales, that are technically dolphins but bigger. More close to orcas than to dolphins. A male pilot whale can weight between 800 and 3500 Kg. We are talking about millions of Kg of biomass extracted from the sea.
They have also complex societies; so is not just "we killed one animal". If you kill the grandmas the entire herd suffer [1]
And pilot whales eat mainly deep water squids, soaked in ammonia and unedible for us, so...
less pilot whales => more unedible squids alive that compete with => edible fishes so we have => worse fisheries and less money in hands of the fishermen
This animals have an economic value also when alive. You can hunt each one one time... or could fill a boat with tourists willing to pay to see it, and repeat the process from the next fourty years, that is what they do in Canary Islands:
[1] Most animals don't have grandmas and grandpas. Normally post reproductive animals are useless for the species and are killed fast in nature. This is not the case in an exclusive club that includes us, elephants and many dolphins including pilot whales. They have a important role in the education and care of the baby whales while they parents hunt in deep waters. They keep the maps of the ocean and lead the group also so they live long past their reproductive age.
In fact, it is now a sport activity carried out when someone spurs Dolphins and an adhoc hunt is carried out.
Could you elaborate on the perspective that you suggest we should have? I am curious since these are sentient creatures with complex social structures that we are talking about here.
Of course they don’t “have to” hunt, they could just buy factory meat like everyone else.
But hunting is of course much more humane than meat factories. I don’t think there is anything wrong with killing animals per se, but animals farmed for meat live awful lives, hunted animals don’t.
Neither are Atlantic white-sided dolphins[0]. It does seem weird to me that people would get upset over this but not our own slaughter of hundreds of millions of animals.
Endangered or not, cetacean intelligence is likely on par with ours. As we get more and more certain that this is the case there will also be increasingly more moral implications here.
I’m not saying that a pig in comparison has less worth by the way. Quite the contrary.
Farming animals is much much worse than killing wild animals. Even when I was a vegetarian for ethical reasons I would eat game, I have no moral objections at all to going out in the forest and shooting a deer for food, but raising pigs in meat factories is horrible.
Of course not, but I don't think that is what happened here. And I am not sure it's wasteful, if they eat all the meat the will eat less of other meats. Gruesome for sure, but not more gruesome than a slaughterhouse.
both pigs and dolphins experience extreme duress when they see their friends getting killed.
That said, dolphins will actively protect humans in the water when sharks are around. for that reason, I'm disgusted at the idea of eating an animal that actively chooses to assist us when we are in danger.
I agree with the argument you're making, but not with your colonist example. Dolphins, after all, are animals, not people. "Cultural heritage" argument is in a league of its own when it comes to harming humans.
Yes they are "animals". So are we. Our intelligence is not much superior to theirs (it's arguable that only the lack of opposable thumbs prevents them from getting on the ladder of developing technology — they already use tools), and they experience the full range of emotions as we do.
How would you feel as your entire clan was herded into a box canyon and slaughtered with knives, as you wade through their blood awaiting your knife?
The "Cultural Heritage" argument is indeed nothing more than an utter bulls*hit excuse when it comes to such barbaric practices. By the same token, we could justify punishment of being tarred, feathered, drawn and quartered in the town square.
I'm not sure it will be in our lifetime, but I fully expect that eventually all eating of killed meat (vs cultured/lab-grown meat) will be seen as barbaric as other barbaric middle ages practices, and as slavery.
A claim that it is "preposterous" is itself preposterous and works only if you are ignorant.
Dolphins have language, complex society & culture, self-awareness, use tools, use names for themselves & each other, have higher brain/body-mass ratio vs humans, invent games, act ethically, cooperate across species, and that's just the start of the list when we're only just starting to research the topic.
With all of those components of intelligence (and some features even more advanced vs human capabilities), it should not take much intelligence to see how having opposable thumbs and the ability to write and build on information is a very small step in terms of actual intelligence, BUT that this yields massive visible differences in abilities to change one's environment. (It's still to be seen if this is an actual survival advantage - the Great Filter may still be ahead of us, and be accidental suicide by technology misapplication).
Also, claiming that a single point "invalidates" all other arguments commits a number of fallacies, including Overgeneralization, Non-Sequitor, and Argument from Incredulity...
If you want to feel like it's OK to kill and promote killing of other species for no good reason, it'd be better to just own it than to attempt justifying it with dismissive displays of ignorance.
We do indeed make exceptions for humans. We frequently ignore issues like child marriage. Widespread pederasty was ignored in Afghanistan for respect of their culture.
Even in the “Western” world the lack of statutory rape law in France (just changed this year) was mostly ignored because it was just considered part of French culture.
>In fact, some cultures were successful colonists.
And those cultures are very proud to have been more technological advanced than the colonized and had the vision to conquer and spread civilization.
I'd google for "Black Legend" if I were you.
>I suspect they would suddenly decide to leave some practices in the past.
That's very naive, you just have to look around a bit to see that many cultures don't really care if some people in other parts of the world find them outdated.
This comment of you indicates a lack of knowledge on so many things and it predicates the marketing campaigns we've been suffering for centuries.
It would be better to educate yourself about history and the relations between colonialist empires before trying to sound smart.
I'm not particularly into animal rights but this does seem gratuitous to catch them in such large numbers with no-one making sure that enough have been caught. How many will definitely become food and how many will spoil/get discarded.
I guess a similar issue already exists with commercial fishing and the 1000s of animals killed as collatoral, except Dolphins being larger and more intelligent does seem much worse.
Funny how 'traditional' here is implied to have a positive connotation, as if to say: Well, here are some people who did something we don't like, but it's maybe justified since it was tradition.
Tradition need not mean good, this one is clearly barbaric by modern standards.
I don't know about the other 2, but I wouldn't say sustainable. Humans have been overhunting species for a long while now, from the Ice Age megafauna, to lions in Europe in Antiquity and the Dodo a few centuries ago, and plenty of species currently.
If anything, sustainability is a pretty new concept.
Sounds like quite the barbarian 'culture'. Killing animals for food is one thing, doing it as a hobby for fun is incredibly weird. You can't even eat them i think, so they died for absolutely no reason.
You do understand that > Killing animals [. . .] as a hobby [. . .]
Is something that happens in most places, right? Hunting exists. It's multi-billion dollar industry.
What about hunting defines a culture as barbaric? If it's done within appropriate and ethical legislative or regulatory contexts, and not to endangered or threatened species, what does it matter in defining whether a culture is barbaric or not?
I do understand it, and i think hunting hobby culture is stupid. That's my personal opinion. Go shoot targets if you want to use a rifle, do another sport if you need exercise. Excluding hunting because of vast overpopulation etc
The diminishing risk those hobby hunters have is hypocritical and pure cowardice, the hunt stands no chance while the alpha loosers are equipped to the teeth and never put their lives in danger. They’re complete and utter loosers in my book, lest they level the playing field..
Per some of the reports - they got too much. They got more than they can store for consumption. Even the town leaders were apologizing for slaughtering too many.
They are killed for ignorance and for making a statement against environmentalists. People sweating blood and tears trying to protecting nature.
Danish have not more rights to hunt whales for cultural or historical reasons that Spaniards should have. Do you think that Faroese invented cetacean hunting? It was called Basque Whale for something. And do you know what? We stopped it. Because we wipped them. Spaniard whalers got extinct with the whales. Their children just found a different job. We admitted our mistake and changed.
Almost 100 years later the Basque Whale that was common once in Europe still avoid our coasts. There are a few thousands of those whales remaining in all the N Atlantic. His japanese cousin is much worse. They are not pigs. Not even close.
So what this people did is a huge "f*k you, I'm different" to the rest of Europe. Not more, not less. They don't even understand that this whales don't eat fishes [1].
We see a lot of this anti-knowledge people raising again from their caves lately. Spain is in middle of its first six generation forest wildfire and... surprise, surprise, it was deliberated. As usual just a few weeks after the Californian wildfires. A man lost his life trying to fight against this crime, so... What we can do with those kind of people?
Keep trying to respect their feelings? their "my culture is special?" Trying to justify it because the bullshit "we do it for the meat that nobody needed"?
NOPE
[1] I know it. I have necropsied a few that stranded dead. And don't let me talk about the parasites in the meat, or about the smell.
-The whales which were killed in this incident are not an endangered species; while I think killing animals for fun is ethically dubious at best, culling a healthy population for food hardly makes my ethic-o-meter needle wiggle.
(That being said, it would appear they overdid this one, what with there being some 40-50,000 Faroese or so, all told - that would be an awful lot of whale to digest per capita.)
Full disclosure: I happily eat minke whale and even seal whenever I come across it. Norwegian.
From what I understand they organise the hunts when a pod of cetaceans is spotted off the coast. Rather than sending fishing fleets out, they corral them into a fjord and slaughter them on the beach.
In some ways this is better than fishing fleets, there is no bycatch and they aren't trawling or reducing stocks. But there is also an international ban on whaling, and they are part of the EU which also has a ban. In this case it was just that the pod was much larger than normally finds its way to the isles
In fact, some cultures were successful colonists. Should they be allowed to capture the Faroe islands and enslave the locals under the guise of "cultural heritage"?
Times change, and human society on the whole must change. Cultures that refuse to change can and sometimes should be cut off from the rest of society. How well would they handle being isolated by the rest of the world, with no commerce or outside support? I suspect they would suddenly decide to leave some practices in the past.