Most Japanese don't really like whale meat

[Kim]

This kind of position really undermines your argument. On the one hand, we are talking about a natural wild resource and on the other hand, livestock raised for food. They are two totally different things, and I hope you realize that.

There is nothing similar about raising cows for food and hunting whales (or any seafood or wild animal) for food. While environmental impact issues should be considered in both cases, trying to justify one by citing other only muddies the debate.

Maybe to you it undermines the argument. Most of any type of fish comes from the wild - although fish-farming is also used in some places these days. To me eating animals is eating animals and I don't see any moral difference between which one. As long as the activity is sustainable, hunting in the wild is something humanity has been doing since it's inception. Most people would have to agree that taking much less than 1% of a population is completely sustainable.

 

[Humuhumunukunukuapua'a]

Kim, listen!

It's not a moral debate. It's an ecological debate. Dang, it's pretty darn simple! Stop trying to cloud the discussion.

And I mentioned any seafood or wild animal in my post. Such harvesting is VERY different in terms of impact on wild animal population from harvesting farmed animals. On the one hand, you impact wild animal populations by killing them. On the other, you don't. Simple, really.

And, frankly I don't think you know diddly about what is sustainible any more than the vast majority of hunters have over the history of mankind. Everyone always thinks that what they are harvesting now is sustainible. THIS TIME we have it all figured out. That's total crap! Populations almost always decline and in the vast majority of cases, our assumptions about sustainibility are dead wrong.

My guess is that your assumptions, based on numbers provided by the whaling industry, will prove to be dead wrong too. If we had been discussing this in 1900, you would be telling me how there are so many Right whales, we have nothing to worry about.

I know your wife is Japanese, so you for some reason feel like you have a personal stake in defending whaling, but you should read others' posts lest you look like you are just irrationaly defending whaling for personal reasons without really considering the argument. Oops...too late.

 

[Kim]

I have moved the discussion beginning on the sustainability of whaling to a new thread as it is off topic for this one:
http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?t=129823

 

[wardric]

Maybe we should start raising whales for food

 

[Tom Winters]

Well there's hope on the horizon for all sorts of people ranging from Jeffrey Dahmer to....
http://www.eathufu.com/
Now right now, it's just an alternative to human flesh and not whale meat, but how hard could it be for their product development people to sprinkle some krill flakes over the hufu vats and make up some new labels?
I guess it's too late for Jeffery Dahmer since he did get stabbed to death and Ed Gein, another gourmet of the long-pig, died in 1984, but there have to be others out there trying to kick the human food habit.
Ah geez, I just saw on the website a baby seal cookbook. They had to go and ruin everything...
Althoug, would you rather have someone eating whale meat, your little sister, or some dopey baby seal?

 

[wardric]

Did you just watch Soylent green?

 

[DavidPT40]

In the long run, hunter-gatherer activity is environmentally unsustainable. No matter how noble it seems.

 

[wardric]

In the long run, hunter-gatherer activity is environmentally unsustainable. No matter how noble it seems.

I disagree with that generalisation, please precise your toughts

 

[H2Andy]

wow.. yeah... that's simply not true

hunters and gatherers have survived in patches of the world to this day,
and their environment has been little affected by their practices

200 years of industrial revolution and ... well... not pretty

 

[DavidPT40]

Heres biologist Alan Rabinowitz take on hunter-gatherer lifestyles. In the passage below, he is commenting on forest people of Thailand. However, he helped save the jaguar from extinction in Belize. Indigenous Mayan people were driving several animals to extinction, including the jaguar and a type of parrot.


"I have heard terms such as "noble savage" and "sustainable use" used to describe simple forest peoples and their way of life. But these words have little relevance to real-life situations. It is neither noble nor savage to work, fight, and kill for your survival. Nor is this kind of lifestyle "sustainable". As long as these communities increase in size and young people take over larger forest tracts, the wildlife will continue to disappear. In the past when village growth was much slower, and undeveloped forest patches were much larger than they are today, these villages caused a lot less damage. "

Chasing the Dragon's Tail- pg 95