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by mcculley 1741 days ago
This would make some sense if we were farming dolphin. Pigs are not endangered.
4 comments

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

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.

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.
White-sided are not common dolphins
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

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.
Not if you only do it once every few decades. Normally they kill much much fewer.
Yep, they said the same with the great auk
It's a statistical fact, last time they killed this many was before the war.
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.

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

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.
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.
I missed that, then it’s of course terrible. Under normal situations that is not the case.
I am also against factory farming. That is orthogonal to the argument about there being plenty of pigs/dolphins.
You said "but we're not farming dolphins". My point is that hunting dolphins is better than farming them, not worse.
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.

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

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