It’s a bloody business, but it’s not immoral to kill whales for food

GIVEN any thought to what you’ll be eating for dinner tonight?

Perhaps you have already tucked in. Either way, chances are, some kind of meat was involved. But our view on what constitutes something worth tucking into is largely determined by our culture. It’s actually quite limited: beef, pork, chicken, lamb, fish, shellfish — and venison and a few other birds if you consider yourself upmarket.

Around the world, though, people kill a wide variety of creatures to eat their flesh. If it is edible, you can pretty much guarantee that somebody, somewhere, eats it. In most of the West we view only a select few species as “food”, although you don’t have to travel very far to find frog-eaters while a carnivorous Belgian friend who is very dear to me thinks nothing of tucking into a plate of horsemeat.

On my travels, I have devoured plenty of animals that we would never dream of eating at home, admittedly with mixed results. Snake? Never again, thanks. Locusts, on the other hand, aren’t bad at all. Warthog, I can testify, is actually quite delicious while ostrich has made it on to a few restaurant menus for good reason. Goat, rabbit, crocodile, wild boar and reindeer are all perfectly passable, but turtle? Yuk.

I do draw the line somewhere — we all do, quite irrationally. I turned my nose up at cockroaches once and I couldn’t bring myself to eat a dog unless I was truly starving. I’d happily eat a squirrel — curried preferably — but I’m squeamish about monkeys even if they are a delicacy in parts of Africa and Asia.

But given that we travel more than ever and our diets have become infinitely more varied, why do we look at Japan, Norway and Iceland and say, how dare you harvest whales in what is most likely a sustainable manner?

Yes, I’ve sampled and it’s nothing to write home about but definitely preferable to some of the (literally) rotten fish the Scandinavians consider a delicacy.

The taking of no other animal for meat, however, provokes such an extreme reaction as the whale. The US is currently leading an effort to broker an agreement that would limit and ultimately end whale hunting by Japan, Norway and Iceland. The compromise deal, which has generated intense controversy with anti-whaling activists, would allow the three whaling countries to continue hunting reduced numbers for the next 10 years.

In return, the whaling nations would agree to the placing of tracking devices and international monitors on all their whaling vessels.

For some reason, the Japanese seem to draw particular ire. “Save the whale” is an easy way for nations to establish their green credentials and take the moral high ground. It is also a rather handy and PC way for these nations to draw a line between their “humaneness” in contrast to the bloody antics of the Japanese.

When they aren’t being stereotyped, the Japanese are harshly criticised, accused of “buying off” small nations that whore their votes to overturn the whaling moratorium in return for promises of aid packages.

Is this any worse, I wonder, than the representatives of white Western nations, which have no tradition of, or interest in, hunting whales, lecturing the Japanese? This holier-than-thou attitude seems to stem from a belief that animals like whales need to be understood as individuals, even spiritual beings which devote their supposedly vast intelligence to the realms of the heart. There are dramatic attempts to them, be it from Japanese ships or natural disasters, which seem divorced from a sensible plan to preserve the species. It isn’t even as though every species of whale is endangered.

For some reason, though, whales are exempted from the sustainable-use principle — an exemption that places whales above and apart from the animal kingdom to which they obviously belong. These responses are based on a sentimental view of nature, permissible in teenagers perhaps, but disturbing in anyone old enough to know better.

Take the philosopher Paola Cavalieri writing in The Guardian earlier this month: “Whales are dignified, intelligent and sensitive beings. We have known this for some time, and yet still they remain, much to our shame, susceptible to human assault.” Really? And just why is a whale any more dignified than, say, a cow? Is it really any more sensitive?

As for intelligent, have you seen the size of a blue whale’s brain relative to the rest of its bulk? Is something that just drifts along vacuuming up seawater to filter out the plankton really MBA material? Frankly, this animal rights sentiment is the product of the increasing infantilisation of Western society, an inability to deal with the cold, hard truths like the fact that animals — even cute ones — die. I can just imagine the reaction here were India to condemn us for eating hamburgers.

People like and want to protect cute and cuddly animals like whales, dolphins, tigers, and spotted owls; they could care less about all the bacteria, algae, insects, bugs, and other creepy crawlies that disappear from the ecosystem annually.

TRUE, the blue whale was hunted almost to extinction but other cetaceans are relatively plentiful. Harvesting a few hundred minkes scarcely makes an impact on a total population estimated at perhaps a million. The whaling ban, then, is maintained in spite of some highly questionable science.

But with the non-sustainability argument having lost some of its force, the anti-whaling lobby comes up with new lines of attack. The impact of whale meat on human health is talked up — despite the fact that people have been eating it for centuries with little evidence of adverse effects.

Alternatively, as Cavalieri puts it, “the claim that the depleted species of whales are flourishing again — a claim that, apart from being contested, misses the point, which is now about moral protection, not conservation of harvestable resources”.

So the lobby talks animal welfare. Whaling is, after all, a bloody business. It isn’t for the fainthearted — although “humane killing” does always strikes me as a bit of an oxymoron. Still, the manner in which whales are killed is rather troubling. Generally they are shot with a harpoon, sometimes leading to a period of suffering. By contrast, in modern slaughterhouses, cows are theoretically turned into Big Macs quite quickly. The trade-off for this quick death, though, is very often spending their entire lives in a facility more akin to a factory than a farm.

It’s a difficult one: a long life lived free or a not much of a life and a painless death? Those ethical issues cannot be easily dismissed. Truth be told, vegetarianism does have significant moral force. But if you are not a vegan, and consider yourself some sort of environmentalist, perhaps it’s time to, at least, reconsider your knee-jerk opposition to whaling.

There is infinitely more humanity in killing creatures for food than there is in depicting species of animals as being superior to nations of human beings — even if my palate doesn’t find their flesh particularly tasty.