I’ve been reading Richard Black’s updates from the latest IWC* annual conference with interest. Like him, and many fisheries experts, I am struck by the fact that the IWC was set up to regulate whaling not ban it, and that it has been somewhat hijacked by more fundamental conservation interests.
That is not to say there are not moral arguments against whaling, but that I do find it hard to know why the line should be drawn at whales and not other apparently sentient animals. This is the conservation world’s version of the Iraq war argument: sure toppling an evil dictator like Saddam Hussein may be a good thing**, but why stop there? Why not Burma (as it was in 2003), North Korea and Zimbabwe? (Why also not the Central African Republic which is equally badly governed but gets far fewer column inches?) To which one inevitably concludes that the second Iraq war was at least partly about oil, just no-one would admit it. Similarly one concludes that the ban on whaling is at least partly about public opinion driven by idealistic visions of majestic oceanic leviathans and impressively intelligent dolphins than the Hobbesian reality of life in the open seas.***
But the first of Richard’s posts got me thinking about the opposite point of view. Before giving my perspective, I’m going to try an experiment, and post a poll on this blog for the first time, to get reader perspectives. So go and have a read of this, then tell me what you think.
I think all of the above have some legitimacy, but I’ll expand on that and come off the fence next week. If enough of you have voted by then I’ll let you know the results, but either way will leave the poll open for a while and see what transpires.
* International Whaling Commission
** In practice, of course, it didn’t exactly turn out the way everyone hoped, but that is a different kind of argument, that suggests that going to war very rarely achieves the aims of the aggressor, but definitely will lead to huge loss of life and human suffering.
*** Ref that scene in David Attenborough’s magnum opus, the Blue Planet , in which a baby grey whale is mercilessly hunted down by killer whales.
Bottom Up Thinking 
Posted by Whither whaling – is it just morally wrong? « Bottom Up Thinking on July 19, 2012 at 7:59 am
[…] If you are coming to this blog new before you read this and following posts please consider reading my previous one and voting in the poll. […]
Posted by Whither the Western Grey Whales? Stopping biodiversity loss « Bottom Up Thinking on July 19, 2012 at 1:16 pm
[…] This is part two of a seven part series on my views on the philosophy of conservation and the case of the Western Grey Whales off Sakhalin in particular – see Richard Black’s article for an introduction. If you are coming to this blog new, before you read this and following posts please consider reading my earlier one and voting in the poll. […]
Posted by Whither the Western Grey Whales – will saving them save other wildlife? « Bottom Up Thinking on July 20, 2012 at 5:31 am
[…] This is part three of a seven part series on my views on the philosophy of conservation and the case of the Western Grey Whales off Sakhalin in particular – see Richard Black’s article for an introduction. If you are coming to this blog new, before you read this and following posts please consider reading my earlier one and voting in the poll. […]
Posted by Whither the Western Grey Whales – taking a stand against global warming « Bottom Up Thinking on July 20, 2012 at 11:35 am
[…] This is part four of a seven part series on my views on the philosophy of conservation and the case of the Western Grey Whales off Sakhalin in particular – see Richard Black’s article for an introduction. If you are coming to this blog new, before you read this and following posts please consider reading my earlier one and voting in the poll. […]
Posted by Whither the Western Grey Whales – might sacrificing a sub-species be justified? « Bottom Up Thinking on July 23, 2012 at 8:36 am
[…] This is part five of a seven part series on my views on the philosophy of conservation and the case of the Western Grey Whales off Sakhalin in particular – see Richard Black’s article for an introduction. If you are coming to this blog new, before you read this and following posts please consider reading my earlier one and voting in the poll. […]
Posted by Whither the Western Grey Whales – will regulation suffice? « Bottom Up Thinking on July 25, 2012 at 12:13 pm
[…] This is part six of a seven part series on my views on the philosophy of conservation and the case of the Western Grey Whales off Sakhalin in particular – see Richard Black’s article for an introduction. If you are coming to this blog new, before you read this and other posts in this series please consider reading my earlier one and voting in the poll. […]
Posted by Whither the Western Grey Whales? You want them, you pay for them! « Bottom Up Thinking on July 26, 2012 at 2:00 pm
[…] This is part seven of a seven part series on my views on the philosophy of conservation and the case of the Western Grey Whales off Sakhalin in particular – see Richard Black’s article for an introduction. If you are coming to this blog new, before you read this and other posts in this series please consider reading my earlier one and voting in the poll. […]
Posted by So what, finally, about those Western Grey Whales? « Bottom Up Thinking on July 27, 2012 at 11:12 am
[…] kicked this series of posts off with a poll. I asked you readers to select from a number of […]
Posted by No killing cuddly animals (even if they’re not cuddly)! « Bottom Up Thinking on January 9, 2013 at 10:45 am
[…] Mike Shanahan touched upon the same problem in his confession that he once ate shark fin soup. We are back at the same question of “What is conservation for?” that I tackled in my series last year on the Sakhalin whales. […]