[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

[Grustaf]

It's a statistical fact, last time they killed this many was before the war.

[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.

[Grustaf]

I missed that, then it’s of course terrible. Under normal situations that is not the case.

[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.