[blunte]

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.

[Grustaf]

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?

[pvaldes]

> 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:

https://www.freebirdone.com/details/short-finned-pilot-whale...

So, maybe Faroese are not so smart as they think.

[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.

[Grustaf]

Sure, I'n not saying it's exactly the same thing or that it's good, but we should also have some perspective.

[solarengineer]

They no longer need to hunt dolphins for food.

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.

[Grustaf]

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.

[pvaldes]

We talk about an entire group of protected species, not about hunting. Different legal category.

In Europe is even illegal to harass them. Their fat stains all and smell for weeks and their meat is not really very good. Some similar cetaceans are treated as toxic waste when die in a beach because lot of toxics accumulate easily in the fat.

This is a strange exception to environmental laws that is basically a tantrum of a few people (50.000 against 740 millions of people) and not really justified. Economically is a waste of resources and is bad for local tourism. Moreover this animals don't "belong" to Faroese people. The same whales migrate from Senegal to Iceland. They are so Portuguese, or French, as Danish.

[pvaldes]

I correct myself, is "repeat the process -for- the next 40 years"

[mcculley]

This would make some sense if we were farming dolphin. Pigs are not endangered.

[bryan0]

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_white-sided_dolphin

[jnwatson]

The general argument is that cetaceans are smart and are worthy of more protection.

At the same time, pigs can be pretty smart. Too bad they are made of bacon.

[mcculley]

https://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin says there are only 300,000 of them. Killing 1,400 at a time seems like an easy way to endanger the species.

[pvaldes]

White-sided are not common dolphins

[docdeek]

Are the white-sided dolphins that are at issue here endangered? Wikipedia says they aren’t, ranked as ‘Of Least Concern’ on the conservation scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_white-sided_dolphin

[mcculley]

https://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin says there are only 300,000 of them. Killing 1,400 at a time seems like an easy way to endanger the species.

[Grustaf]

Not if you only do it once every few decades. Normally they kill much much fewer.

[pvaldes]

Yep, they said the same with the great auk

[musha68k]

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.

[pvaldes]

They are very pelagic and don't get close to the coast, so difficult to study. I had seen two in my life.

[Grustaf]

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.

[musha68k]

I agree factory farming is terrible but this wasteful and gruesome killing is also terrible.

Definition of vegetarian diet might be a bit stretched here.

Either way you don’t condone killing all deer in a certain forest, do you? So much “game” that there won’t be any one healthy animal left?

[Grustaf]

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.

[musha68k]

Did you read the article? They have to throw lots of those carcasses into landfills as they are running out of ways to handle, store and consume that much meat.

[mcculley]

I am also against factory farming. That is orthogonal to the argument about there being plenty of pigs/dolphins.

[Grustaf]

You said "but we're not farming dolphins". My point is that hunting dolphins is better than farming them, not worse.

[mcculley]

I agree that hunting is better than farming, generally. (Not in all scenarios. I would not want to be hunted to exhaustion over a long period of suffering.)

We are farming pigs and guaranteeing a supply. We are not farming dolphins. There will eventually be as many as mammoths.

[mlindner]

No comment on the pigs argument, but dolphins and pilot whales are not endangered. They're ranked as "least concern".

[mcculley]

https://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin says there are only 300,000 of them. Killing 1,400 at a time seems like an easy way to endanger the species.

We should still be concerned.

[mlindner]

That's around 1% of the population. They breed a lot more than that every year.

[cultofmetatron]

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.

[procgen]

The problem is the same one posed by the consumption of pigs: needless suffering.

[mc32]

Lots of cultures are allowed quotas by their governments to harvest resources other people aren’t allowed.

One such is the annual Taiji dolphin catch in Japan[1]. But native Alaskans and Canadians have certain rights too.

As long as they don’t contribute to extinction this is better than modern animal husbandry such as veal.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiji_dolphin_drive_hunt

[soco]

The quota was 200 and they slaughtered 1400 then said oopsadaisy.

[adzm]

Additionally they are using modern boats and technology; that is much different.

[kspacewalk2]

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.

[toss1]

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.

[dunefox]

.

[toss1]

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.

[tasoga]

Well that's just your cultural upbringing. Maybe my cultural heritage involves cannibalism, after all, humans are just meat as well

[blunte]

Even so, it's one thing to eat a human who has died naturally or by accident vs chasing down and killing another human to eat them.

[jnwatson]

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.

[goohle]

Dolphins are "non-human person". We have no specialized word for creatures like dolphins, but they are not "animals", they are "persons".

https://www.giveindia.org/blog/four-reasons-why-india-recogn...

[tarboreus]

Persons implies a legal recognition, I think. I'd call them sapients, connoting highly intelligent entities.

[smabie]

According to India maybe? Almost everyone would call dolphins "animals"

[throwaway59553]

>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.

[okokwhatever]

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.