Comments chadroberts has made

Whales are not cattle

Comparing the "capturing" of whales to the slaughtering of cattle is invalid ecologically.  A more apt comparison would be to compare the "harvesting" of whales to "harvesting" deer or wildebeest.  Whales are wild organisms, free-living; they are not "owned" by a rancher, nor by the whalers.  Under U.S. laws, they would be considered a "trust" resource owned by all American citizens.

All questions about the rights of the individual whales or the pain and suffering that they experience aside, it is totally misleading to compare eating meat from whales to eating meat from bovines (unless your bovines are cape buffalo or something like that).  The ecological comparison is to "bushmeat," the parts of wild animals that can be purchased in markets in many parts of the less-developed world.

The problem with treating wild populations as if they were domestic livestock is that wild populations experience ecological forces that cattle in feedlots and pasturelands (or chickens or hogs, so forth) don't.  Nobody is explicitly protecting whales from the effects of warming oceans, from the effects of military sonar and other weapons, from the effects of prey population crashes (even if someone were trying to do this, it's unlikely that they would be able to do so).  Whale populations may crash next year from any number of causes, anticipated or not.  

People who value biological diversity need to get past superficial comparisons like that offered by the Australian.  Hunting a wild species has direct and indirect effects on biodiversity (such as the extinction of African monkey species or even chimps).  Hunting whales in the oceans is no different from killing monkeys in African forests.  Buying a whale steak is not the same thing as buying a Big Mac.On Japanese, Norwegians, and Icelanders spout off in favor of whaling posted 3 years, 8 months ago 6 Responses