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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Faroese have hunted whales since time basically immemorial as people with more land have hunted deer. They are also allowed to, under international law, to hunt whales just as say Inuit are. Their hunting is sustainable, always has been.
The anti-whaling convention was instituted to stop commercial exploitation of the seas, to stop the great whaling ships, it was not instituted to stop people feeding themselves.
So kindly fuck off and I have a song for you.
If there were a nation that still practiced cannibalism, should everyone be fine with it because they've been doing it a long time and it's part of their culture? Even if sustainable because they only ate the criminals?
Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't mean it should still be acceptable, especially as we learn more such as the intelligence and importance to the food chain that whales have. It's not like there are no other options.
Let me guess yet another vegan.
The Faroer don't have enough arable land for everyone to switch to a vegan diet. They could import the rest of what they need, yes, but their only notable export product is fish so that wouldn't make much sense would it.
And with "only notable export product" I mean "stamps are on place number two". You know, the kind you glue onto envelopes.
Just to be clear, you're no longer saying it's ok to kill whales because it's cultural and they've been doing it a long time? You're now saying that it's ok because they would be economically ruined if they didn't kill whales?
I'm not trying to be combative, just trying to clarify.
Both are things that make killing whales ok. It's just that when arguing with vegans "they'd literally starve" is a way more productive argument.
Got it, thanks for clarifying. I think both lines of reasoning have problems though:
I can think of many things to fill in for X and Y that satisfy the necessary conditions, but still aren't ok. I do, however, think this line of reasoning is valid:
I don't think any vegan would take issue with #3, since in that case Z is necessary, and vegans are only concerned with unnecessary harm.
I mean I could have gone deeper into it but then I didn't particularly feel like arguing with a vegan. Yes, I'm speciesist, we can leave it at that.
The Faroer certainly needed whaling in the past to survive, and that necessity has engrained itself in their solidarity culture -- everything about how the hunt is done and distributed is communal, closest comparison I can come up when looking at Germany would be the status of the fire department in a village: Not the inn, not the church, not even the football club, but the fire department is the core and beating heart of the community and its solidarity. They had a brief stint with commercial whaling but they stopped that before commercial whaling got outlawed, couldn't compete with the Norwegians and their giant ships.
Faroese being as green and nature-conscious as they are they would indeed stop if the whales were endangered... but they aren't. Dolphins are controversial, I guess they're going to stop hunting them within the next decade or two. That, or the rest of us are going to poison the seas even more so that the meat becomes completely inedible. It's dire.
So from what you're saying, it seems like not only is killing whales unnecessary for the Faroer anymore, but the document you linked seems to imply that it's actively detrimental to their health.
Also this response doesn't really engage with what I said before about the lines of reasoning being flawed. You're painting a picture of how whaling has been an integral part of their cultural history, and that's interesting information, but it doesn't really relate to whether it's the right thing to do.
So again, it's an argument of the form "X is ok because it's cultural and we've been doing X for a long time," which I don't think is very persuasive.
And one more thing: you're now saying that they don't kill whales commercially? So "Y is ok because we would be economically ruined if we didn't do Y" doesn't even apply, right? Or am I reading what you said incorrectly?
You have yet to establish, or even argue, that eating whale meat is a wrong in the first place. Approaching your life from an "if it's not proven to be ok, then it's bad" kind of perspective may be jerkoff fuel for the dedicated moralist, but is ultimately not anyone's principle of acting. It's not how our minds work. It is a convenient way to acquire a crippling load of shame if one so wishes.
Life is dangerous to health.
Yes. You're mixing up different things.
Sure we can do that, I just didn't want to hijack a conversation about what makes killing whales ok with a bunch of other separate considerations.
Separately, there's the environmental impact. No matter how sustainable the whaling is, it's not like they're overpopulating and need to be culled or something. Whales are important in the ocean ecosystem, and they're good at sequestering carbon on the sea floor for a very very long time when they die. It seems pretty obvious to me that killing whales is done out of self interest (we like eating them, it's our tradition, etc.) rather than out of some altruistic sense of duty to preserve the ecosystem, and not killing them at all would be the most sustainable solution.
And finally, I don't know a ton about it but evidently there are some pretty serious health concerns with eating whales, that makes it seem like you could argue for not eating them (and therefore not killing them) purely out of self-interest to maintain your own personal health.
Is everything you do altruistic? If no, then why should we be altruistic specifically there, if yes, then how do you manage to lie to yourself on such a fundamental level?
No of course not. I was mostly just trying to make the case that killing whales isn't good for the environment, or is at least strictly worse than not killing them. The sustainability of whaling mostly refers to killing just few enough that we can continue killing them indefinitely, rather than any sort of positive effect on the environment. Clearly if we were actually interested in environmental sustainability we just wouldn't be killing whales at all.
Did you have any thoughts about the other two points I made? I'm also curious why you're so passionate about defending people who kill whales, since this seems like a pretty uncommon opinion.
If we were actually, without-compromise, interested in the sustainment of the environment we'd end the human race right here and now, because we'll always have an oversized impact. Or we could realise that we're not separate from our environment, nature in general, for some reason alienation from nature is rampant even among environmentalists, many they see it as this pristine, alien, innocent thing on a pedestal that they need to stay away from, never interfere, to protect it and the distance created there helps them (and those not identifying as environmentalists) to ignore the mercury they're pumping into the oceans.
As such the question "what is good for the environment' doesn't really make sense -- ecology 101 teaches us that you can't see the environment separate from the creature, the creature separate from its environment. You can ask "what is good ecology" and that's, as a first approximation, when things are thriving and interconnected so that mutual adaption occurs. The Faroese are connected to their whales, that's all that matters to me here. They're very much not seal clubbers, looking at their bank statements instead of the animals they're hunting (and Greelanders aren't, either. I could write another rant about the damage that knee-jerk moralistic seal fur embargo did but I'll leave it at this, as well as a brief update. dig into it at your own leisure).
As to unnecessary pain: The Faroese actually agree with you. That's why they switched to spinal lancing in favour of old, much less sure, methods. That's why you bonk fish on the head before gutting them, why you don't let them asphyxiate, that's why you pet rabbits while aligning the bolt gun. It's why stress hormones taste bad. Curious adaptation from our side, isn't it? Heck, in a sense that's even why you cut basil directly above a node, not mindlessly ripping off leaves. That's a kind of consideration you'll never see in a goat.