Wednesday, August 19, 2009

"The world is a vampire"

Last week’s episode of Whale Wars (on Animal Planet) was a funeral service for a whale. We were treated to the grief-stricken reaction of ecotoerrorists to the demise of a whale at the hands of a harpooner.

I’ll venture a few comments:

1. I think it would be unfortunate if Japanese whalers hunted certain species into extinction. Mind you, I don’t know that certain species are actually endangered by whalers.

2. That said, the show is manipulating the viewer’s anthropomorphic empathy for the plight of whales as a staking horse to promote a radical agenda. This isn’t just about the conservation of whales. The whole thing is a propaganda device to soften up the audience for something it would resist if ecoterrorists were more forthright about their ulterior motives.

3. Harpooning a whale and then shooting it to deliver the coup de grâce looks brutal. However, it’s no more so than natural predation in the animal kingdom. It’s not as if sharks, barracudas, killer whales, piranhas, wolves, lions, and so forth humanely euthanize their prey before consuming it.

So there’s something deeply incongruous about environmentalists who mourn the death of a whale by whalers. They act as if wild animals are house pets.

Hunters who live off the land are far more in touch with mother nature than yuppie urban environmentalists.

Likewise, is a whaler who harpoons a whale any more or less brutal than a farmer’s wife who wrings the neck of a chicken?

4. Perhaps they’d objection that it’s unnatural to harpoon a whale. But does it matter to the victim whether it dies by natural or unnatural causes?

Moreover, from the standpoint of naturalistic evolution, there’s nothing prescriptive about the natural order. The natural order is not a moral order.

8 comments:

  1. There was a mother and baby whale beached on the West Coast last week and ecologists and greenies went out to save it. They were working against natural selection - these whales were too stupid not to beach and thus die from exposure. Returning them to the wild decreases the quality of the whale gene pool. It would apparently kill them to be consistent with their own worldview.

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  2. Whales are beaching due to having their ear drums crushed by ultra sonic navy sonar. Try looking into the matter before you spray stupid all over the place.

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  3. Speaking of "spray[ing] stupid all over the place":

    "Military sonar has been implicated in the mass stranding of beaked whales. Although there have been environmental groups publishing press releases about all whales being affected by sonar—that's never been demonstrated." (source)

    N - E - X - T !!!

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  4. HART SAID:

    “Whales are beaching due to having their ear drums crushed by ultra sonic navy sonar. Try looking into the matter before you spray stupid all over the place.”

    There are natural causes for beached whales:

    http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1255082.htm

    http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s997632.htm

    http://www.biophysics.uwa.edu.au/Bioacoustics/waustralian.html

    Try looking into the matter before you spray stupid all over the place.

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  5. Hart apparently fails to realise that humans ARE natural causes. Or did humans not evolve from dirt via natural selection acting on lucky mutations?

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  6. Perhaps Hart is a fundy creationist!

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  7. Steve, I'm disappointed in you and may have to submit a recommendation that your Young Earth Creationist lifetime membership be summarily revoked. Surely you know that fundy creationists, to a man, hate the environment and think it's part of our God-given mission on Earth to eradicate all cute animals and harpoon all whales so they can rot.

    Shame on you to think Hart could be among our ranks.

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