Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Whaling

[NBs996]

I still don't appreciate why it's ok to eat a cow but not a whale.
If we need Xkg of meat then why does it matter where it comes from?

What happend on Easter Island then?

[psychlist]

Any animal bred simply to provide food/clothing would not have been alive had it not been for that human intervention so if it wasn't for us it wouldn't have had a "life"......
....but does that give us the "right" to treat it badly before "humanely" killing it!

Sharks aren't bred for food, yet are routinely hauled from the Pacific, have their fins hacked off and then unceremoniously dumped back overboard, ALIVE!
Whales are highly intelligent creatures that don't survive long in captivity and certainly aren't on the cards for battery farming, they're a natural resource that was being rapidly exterminated until the global "ban" was brought in, even so Norway and Japan continued to "take" whales for so called scientific "research", presumably to try to prove that some whales eat fish! Factory fishing has decimated global fish stocks, including Anthony's North Sea Cod. When humanity was merely looking to be self-sufficient (as is the way in a natural environment) there was plenty of fish in the sea and it regularly repopulated itself, back then we didn't even need battery hens to supply enough eggs for Mrs Miggins to make her pies cos they were sold locally, but now they're marketed globally to get a bigger profit.

None of this is ever going to be "right", but just consider our own callousness and selfishness when it comes to the lives and safety of fellow peoples around the world suffering from drought (and I don't mean a hosepipe ban in Surrey) and famine. Whatever troubles we visit upon the animal kingdom, it pales into insignificance when you consider the actions (and INACTIONS) humanity commits upon itself!
We can each do something each day to make peoples or animals (especially the wild ones) lives a little better.

[Chris Wood]

Originally Posted by NBs996

I still don't appreciate why it's ok to eat a cow but not a whale.
If we need Xkg of meat then why does it matter where it comes from?

What happend on Easter Island then?

I really hope this is not a serious comment?

Spend some time researching and clarifying your stance on this one please Nick.

[chicken]

Our great grandchildren may never see whales in real life. On the other hand, I've never seen a dinosaur but I don't feel like I have particularly missed out.

I'm trying hard to balance being a good person against my need to feed and clothe my family, as well as my non-essential desires (like riding a motorbike).

Unfortunately, the more I think about it the more I think I can't - humans are destroying the earth slowly and we're all going to hell...

[NBs996]

Originally Posted by Chris Wood

I really hope this is not a serious comment?

Spend some time researching and clarifying your stance on this one please Nick.

Quite serious - i don't know anything about easter island.

[Chris Wood]

Especially for Nick....

Taken from:

http://www.primitivism.com/easter-island.htm

The history of Easter Island is not one of lost civilisations and esoteric knowledge. Rather it is a striking example of the dependence of human societies on their environment and of the consequences of irreversibly damaging that environment. It is the story of a people who, starting from an extremely limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the world for the technology they had available. However, the demands placed on the environment of the island by this development were immense. When it could no longer withstand the pressure, the society that had been painfully built up over the previous thousand years fell with it.

cont...

The Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, must surely have realised that their very existence depended on the limited resources of a small island. After all it was small enough for them to walk round the entire island in a day or so and see for themselves what was happening to the forests. Yet they were unable to devise a system that allowed them to find the right balance with their environment. Instead vital resources were steadily consumed until finally none were left. Indeed, at the very time when the limitations of the island must have become starkly apparent the competition between the clans for the available timber seems to have intensified as more and more statues were carved and moved across the island in an attempt to secure prestige and status. The fact that so many were left unfinished or stranded near the quarry suggests that no account was taken of how few trees were left on the island.

The fate of Easter Island has wider implications too. Like Easter Island the earth has only limited resources to support human society and all its demands. Like the islanders, the human population of the earth has no practical means of escape. How has the environment of the world shaped human history and how have people shaped and altered the world in which they live? Have other societies fallen into the same trap as the islanders? For the last two million years humans have succeeded in obtaining more food and extracting more resources on which to sustain increasing numbers of people and increasingly complex and technologically advanced societies. But have they been any more successful than the islanders in finding a way of life that does not fatally deplete the resources that are available to them and irreversibly damage their life support system?

Google it for more info.

[NBs996]

Cheers chris, never heard that... although it seems like something that should've been taught at school!

I appreciate what the text is about and can easily relate it to what we're all doing to the world. We strive to live as well as we can work out how, but have too little view on the long term.

Whilst that talks of the evolution of society being self-destructive, and I agree almost entirely that it is, it still don't change my stance on the food chain! The food chain I believe would be naturally self sufficient if it weren't for the likes of sport, entertainment or so-called research - things we do to improve our lifestyle like they did on Easter Island.

To say we can't kill a certain species to sustain our own survival is just not right - And I'm talking about survival, not improving lifestyle. In my view, a whale has just the same right to life as a chicken, no matter why the chicken was born.

[desmojen]

I don't disagree with what you're saying in essence Nick about chickens and whales. It would make me a hypocrite if I did!
The important word in your post though is 'survive'. Humankind does not need whale meat to survive, there are plenty of chickens for that! Whales are killed for the same reasons as sharks and tigers in asia, that is what I disagree with. They are not required as an essential food source, and cannot effectively be farmed, therefore they are going to be fished out of existence. How can that be right?

[TORTUGA]

I think the difference to me is one of how you kill an animal to eat it and that is the same if its either wild or domesticated. In this country livestock is killed quick and as painless as possible. And yes I have seen it for my self. If you want to kill a whale it is not an easy task and there is no way to do it fast and without pain at sea. Whales are a an intelegent complex mammal and are very human like in their make up. Once harpooned they can take 45 minutes plus to die and are in agony the whole time.

I would kill a wild animal if I had to eat I have to say but never for pleasure. I have an uncle who is a football coach working in the US at the moment and when he goes he stays with a family who are trophy hunters. They have a warehouse full of stuffed animals from all over the world which they have shot because they ran out of room at home years ago. The wife recently went to Africa and shot a baby giraffe in front of its mother for a birthday present, they know we Brits dont aprove and so when they send birthday and christmas cards they usually contain pictures of the latest kills just to wind him up. He has just sent me a newspaper clipping from the area in which a local airstewardess has just been to Canada where she shot a polar bear with a bow and arrow so that she could be the youngest women in the world to hold such a record. The bear was found using a helicopter and then dogs were used to keep its attention while she shot it twice with her bow and arrow. The shot that brought it down hit it in the heart/chest area. All the while the eskimos were on hand to shoot it if it turned nasty.
Great! Its ilegal to bring the body into the US so she offered it to the airport to greet visitors to the area as they arrive. She must be one brave women!

The thing with whales is that you dont need to eat them and they are endangered. The Norwegians are planning to expand their hunting grounds due to them not catching as many in their home waters as they wanted (there not there because they are endangered) So they plan to come 200 miles off of the UK coast to kill any whales which happen to be around our coast instead, They cant do it in UK waters because its banned but they can sail up and down the invisible line and take what they find.

If thats cool with people then that is a real shame.

[Jools]

I have killed lots of animals.

When I was a student I worked at a chicken farm where my job was to kill chickens by zapping them with an electric shock to the head after they'd been through a stunner. Before being stunned, the chickens were hauled out of the crates in which they had been transported and hung upside down by their feet in metal stirrups that hauled them off down the processing conveyor. Further down the processing line the chickens were plunged into iced water for a few seconds then a machine like a car wash, but with less flexible brushes stripped most of their feathers off. Following that a team of people used to finish the job plucking any feathers that the machine had left by hand. I also used to have to alternate onto this job and I can tell you that about 5% of the damn things were still alive after they'd been stunned, schocked, plunged into iced water, and through a threshing machine. Sometimes the machines had ripped one of their legs off and they were still sqwauking. I used to wring their necks as quickly as I could to put them out of their misery. Things may have improved in terms of animal welfare in the 30 odd years since then, but somehow I doubt it, so be under no illusions - the chicken that turns up in the supermarket today probably went through the same thing.

I have also shot a whole lot of pheasants, partridges, pigeons and rabbits, in the days when I used to shoot, and given the two experiences I know that I would rather be a pheasant that has spent it's time roaming freely (although encouraged to stay in reasonable proximity by the gamekeeper providing easy access to food and favourable conditions) until the moment come when it's flushed out over the guns. It has three chances, it either gets shot and is dead before it hits the ground, the second situation is that it gets wounded in which case people like me were on hand with good gundogs to retrieve any 'runners' and bring them back to their handlers for them to wring their neck (the handler kills them - if a dog killed or mauled a bird it would never be allowed near the shoot again). The third possibility is that the bird sails high over the guns and gets away unhurt. The same applies to most game (including deer), one moment there it is browsing around in it's own natural habitat the next - bang - it's dead. Even if it's wounded the chances are that the dog will track it down and it will be put out of it's misery within a less than a minute.

Compare that to a chicken raised for food which has a miserable (and very short) existence and I know what I would prefer.

So, unless you are a veggie, bear in mind that everybody kills. I have shot, plucked, drawn and cooked birds myself the only difference between that and me picking up a chicken from Tesco's is that someone eles did my killing for me.

So, my point is that hunting is not always bad. All it means is that you are prepared to engage in tasks like gutting a bird which most people nowadays are too squeamish to do for themselves.

Having said all that in defence of hunting, I personally draw the line at killing animals just for the sake of it and I am completely against uneccessary cruelty.

I think trophy hunting is for people with insatiable egos, it's not big, it's not clever and frankly it appalls me.

I don't agree with hunting endangered species either, so a moratorium on whale hunting is a damn good thing in my view. It's totally uneccessary as a staple foodstuff - just a delicacy for those people with the money to show they can afford to eat it.

Finally, I finished shooting a long time ago (just lost interest in it) and despite my chicken farm experience I still eat chicken and meat of all sorts, however I don't eat Veal or Foie Gras because I disagree with the way it is produced.

Contrary ain't I ?