We look at whales with a degree of awe, almost veneration. In some Pacific, Inuit, and Native American mythologies, they are worshiped as gods. Even in the Judeo-Christian tradition, they are given a remarkable, though largely unremarked, distinction. Read the book of Genesis carefully, and you will see that they are mentioned before, and separately from, all the other animals:
These are largely post-religious days, at least at the level of global technocracies. But we have evidently not wriggled free of our atavistic reverence for these colossal marine mammals. That, at any rate, seems the only way to explain the international outrage at Japan’s announcement that it intends to resume commercial whaling in 2019.
Many whale species are no longer endangered. Blue whales remain tragically sparse, but the recovery of, among others, minke, fin, and humpback whales is one of the underreported stories of the past 20 years. Perhaps, being good news, it runs up against the semi-mandatory pessimism of our age.
Still, numbers are numbers. The moratorium on whale hunting imposed in the 1980s has largely done its job. Not fully, of course, and not for every whale species. We are not yet, alas, back to the cetacean biomass that existed before the slaughters carried out by 19th- and early-20th-century whalers. Still, the ban was only ever supposed to be temporary. Its justification was conservation, not sentimentality.
Yet the heartfelt, furious, and global condemnation in response to Japan’s decision is almost wholly sentimental. The politicians denouncing Japan are faithfully reflecting public opinion in their home countries. Their constituents dislike the idea of hunting whales on principle. Conservation has little to do with it. However plentiful whales became, most people would still oppose their being killed and eaten.
Why? Is it because they are cuddly? Hardly. Try to cuddle one, and you’d soon be sliced open by the barnacles encrusting its vast hide. Some animals — baby seals, for example — look cute to us for the same reason that Disney cartoon characters can look cute, namely that they exaggerate the features of our own young, especially snub noses and big eyes. But there is nothing about a whale that triggers our inherited parental impulses.
Is it, then, because they are intelligent? Here we are getting warmer. The more we learn about sea mammals, the more we understand that they are not only sentient, but social in a way that suggests self-awareness. They can communicate, with “accents” that vary from pod to pod. They can learn tasks that would bring them no evolutionary benefit and remember how to carry them out years later. They attach to their mates and to their young. They even appear to grieve for their dead. All these things naturally make the idea of eating whale meat different from the idea of eating, say, an oyster.
Yet even here, whales are not unique. Pigs are also intelligent social mammals. They also form strong bonds: There is nothing to suggest that the anguish a sow feels when her young are taken from her is any less sharp than that of a bereaved she-whale. But we happily eat pigs in the millions.
No, it comes back to that sense of awe that grabs us in our bellies. Some years ago, a bottlenose whale somehow swam up the Thames into London. I took my children to catch a glimpse of her, joining a vast crowd. We had been pulled to that chilly, built-up riverbank by the same primitive wonder that surely moved our Stone Age ancestors. We felt an emotional blow when, despite the best efforts of teams of marine biologists, she perished.
In a sense, you have to sympathize with the Japanese. They have made a wholly rational decision to respond to an increase in whale numbers by slightly easing the restrictions on hunting. By any definition, the life and death of a hunted whale is less traumatic than the life and death of a domesticated cow, pig, or chicken, yet we do not protect those creatures. Then again, as Japan is now finding, the visceral often trumps the cerebral in world affairs. That is the true measure of the power that these mighty beasts exert over us.
