Yesterday, on September 25, in the Faroe Islands, 219 innocent dolphins and pilot whales, which were migrating past this archipelago, were brutally murdered. They were driven up onto a beach, had hooks placed in their blowholes, and were then painfully hacked away at. They suffered immensely. There is no doubt about that.
These dolphins and pilot whales did absolutely nothing wrong, nothing to deserve this. They were simply swimming their migratory path from one spot to another, when they were intercepted and ambushed by these people.
The Faroe Islands have a small population, ~49,000 people. Their own chief medical officer recommends consuming no more than roughly 8 ounces of dolphin or pilot-whale meat per month, primarily due to the toxicity of these animals - toxicity that is a byproduct of human waste pollution.
So, they really cannot even justify the number of lives they are taking! They just simply don't have a human population that is large enough to warrant these unsustainable and unnecessary murders. What could they possibly be doing with all of the excess meat?
Look, I am the first person who will criticize my own government’s policy on animal welfare and sustainability. I've written an open letter to politicians, I have started a petition to release Lolita, the lonely captive orca at the Miami SeaQuarium, and I have written numerous times about human’s hubris and maltreatment of wildlife.
I think, what scares me the most is just the blatant disregard for wildlife in general. We think we are greatest species on the planet.
Instead, we are the most destructive, cruel, and murderous. We murder our own kind and we murder the gene pools of wildlife. We even murder billions upon billions of animals bred for human consumption every year.
We have tipped the scales in a most bizarre and sick manner. Livestock and animals bred for consumption make up some 700 million tons of biomass on Earth. Humans make up around 300 million tons. Innocent wildlife makes up only 100 million tons.
I think it is time for humans to reassess our priorities.
We are willing to allow hundreds of millions of humans to starve each year so that we can sickeningly feed hundreds of billions of animals living in horrific and confined conditions. And, we are willing to allow all the naturally evolved and unique species on the planet to go extinct at our behest, because of some notion that we have "traditions" or because we want to see how "strong of a species" we really are.
It is beyond disgusting to me to think that we are actually eliminating hundreds of millions of species on this planet so that we can raise only 10 or so different domesticated species which people want to eat. Sadly, humans are turning Earth into a cleansed and homogeneous planet.
For hundreds of millions of years dolphins and whales, elephants and rhinoceros, and many other wildlife evolved to fit within their specific niche. Today, we have significantly reduced their numbers, and we have replaced them in a geometric fashion, with only a handful of domesticated species, whose genetic profile we have manipulated to fit our worldview, to fit our needs.
I don't care if some environment minister, or whomever the fisheries manager is claims that dolphin and whale hunting is sustainable. When looking at the synergy of life and the specific ways in which ocean environments functional healthfully, there is no such thing as sustainable removal of fish, of whales, or dolphins.
Humans, not all, have become adept at manipulating our world. We have stolen the good and replaced it with detritus. We have changed the biosphere, we have altered the genetic distribution of species, and we have committed genocide on a mass level. And it continues to happen.
Even my three-year-old son understands that this is not the way things are supposed to be.
And when I wrote my last article about the Faroe Islands, I received several comments back from Faroese residents and citizens, attempting to persuade me that their hunts were sustainable and that they need these dolphins and whales for survival reasons.
However, every single one of those points is refutable. Just take a look at this website!
The Faroe Islands are wealthy. Yes, they are an island, but they are not alone. They import food, including animal proteins raised purposefully for human consumption. And while, I absolutely (also) don't agree with the animal-agriculture industry (I don’t eat animals), THIS is the murder of a UNIQUE AND FINITE species, Which does not receive any assistance whatsoever from humans. There is no such thing as sustainable whale or dolphin hunting.
My heart and my sadness go out to the lives lost in yesterday's “grind.” The 219 lives that were stolen, the genetic material that will be forever lost. The countless unaccounted-for individuals.
To add insult to injury, as I write this, today, in Taiji, Japan, a family of pilot whales has just been corralled into the cove. Whose fate will likely be death.
Taiji and Faroe Islands...woven from the same cloth.
When will humans stop treating everything on this planet as a commodity and instead just be grateful that we to have a home? Why is it that humans can't seem to live in harmony with the rest of the natural world?