12 ms·
How can any human come up with the idea of hunting creatures that are 200 years old? Where do we get this sense of superiority?
by mosselman 8y ago
How can any human come up with the idea of hunting creatures that are 200 years old? Where do we get this sense of superiority?
- spacehome 8y agoWhales are made of atoms that we can put to other uses. Our atoms are just as old (mostly) as theirs.
- danieltillett 8y agoI think whales atoms are slightly older on average than human atoms since whales have a slightly higher percentage of hydrogen than humans and all hydrogen goes back to the Big Bang. An interesting question to consider.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoYou're technically correct. Which is the best kind of correct...
- yesenadam 8y agoNah, the spirit of the law is a better thing than the letter of the law.
- spacehome 8y agoThat's fair.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> and all hydrogen goes back to the Big Bang. No, it doesn't, at least not as hydrogen. Some hydrogen atoms are produced by neutron decay.
- danieltillett 8y agoYes some hydrogen is produced by radioactive decay, but it is minor - "...almost all hydrogen..."
- danieltillett 8y agoGreenland sharks are 500 years old and nobody seems to get worked up about killing them - eating them on the other hand is something to get worked up about [0]. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
- cwmma 8y agoyeah that's because their skin is basically soaked in urine, so it's a kind of niche market compared to the industrial harvesting of whales, a group of species known to be very intelligent.
- mosselman 8y agoThat is amazing, thanks. I don't understand what we humans do sometimes. We aren't the greatest.
- logfromblammo 8y agoHakarl is already a crime against humanity. Making it from nitrogen-saturated toxic meat is a crime against Earth.
- krylon 8y agoOn the upside, one might argue that people eating this stuff are already punishing themselves, so to speak.
- logfromblammo 8y agoPunishing themselves, and anyone else in the same room^Wbuilding^Wcity block.
- DalasNoin 8y agofrom this wikipedia article "The authors further concluded that the species reaches sexual maturity at about 150 years of age"
- yesenadam 8y ago
- gadders 8y agoSeeing your kids go hungry? I'm talking about hundreds of years ago, not modern times obviously.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoIIRC whaling back then wasn't done for food (except by the inuit), but for the blubber (for lights) and extracts (as a daily nutrient boost / "medicine"). I think my parents were still made to eat that. I don't know the details though, I guess it had some essential vitamins and such they couldn't get in regular food? Like modern-day fish oil.
- gadders 8y agoFunnily enough, a few years back I invited my 90+ year old Nan to a barbecue, and my wife said to ask her if there was anything she didn't eat. "Yes, whale meat. We had it during the war and you didn't know if you were eating meaty fish or fishy meat."
- masonic 8y agoThe most valuable product was spermaceti, the cleanest-burning light source before electric light.
- gameswithgo 8y agoPerhaps they didn't know at the time, but I doubt they would of cared, see also lumberjacks: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vintage-photos-of-lumberjacks-and-the-giant-trees-they-felled https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vintage-photos-of-lumb...
- gglitch 8y agoI didn't get it until I looked at the photos, which completely shocked me. There's something about them that reminds me of high-quality science fiction, something about the scale, and the hubris, and something about how disconnected they feel from anything I'd think of as my world. Thanks.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoHow is anything superior to anything? We are all atoms and molecules arranged in some state, at a given point in time.It is up to the individual to weigh superiority on their own terms, there are no set rules. Clearly many people believe they are superior to all other species, which may or may not be a good thing depending on how human centric you are.
- macintux 8y agoThat's a dark path, and it's not up to the individual to make that decision. Faced with the choice while driving to swerve to kill a squirrel or not swerve and kill a child, there is only one permissible answer, or else we're endorsing sociopathy.
- avar 8y agoPigs are smart and can live to be around 15 to 20 years old, and by all accounts are as smart or smarter than whales. I don't see how the expected lifespan of a single individual is a determining factor in the moral calculus of what humans should or shouldn't kill. Why isn't it morally equivalent to kill 10 pigs who could have collectively lived to be 200 years old for bacon and killing one whale who could have lived to be 200?
- goatlover 8y agoWell, I would much rather see a 15 to 20 year old tree get cut down than a 200 year old one, even though I don't think cutting down a tree is immoral.
- close04 8y agoThe age of the animal is a factor by virtue of the sheer length of time it takes to have another individual of the same age. There are subtle differences between pigs' and whales' situations: most pigs that are slaughtered are bred as farm animals, not wild ones. So getting another pig of similar characteristics is trivial in effort (time, money, work). You are also not really endangering the species. All whales that are hunted are wild. Getting another individual with the same characteristics as the one you just killed takes a prohibitive amount of anything so nobody is doing it. Their numbers are also dwindling. Yes, we tend to assign greater value to older things. Which is why it's slightly more out of reach to chop down Sequoioideae compared to say your average bamboo trees. Both being plants to which we assign no intelligence or actual affection. It's purely down to replaceability in terms of the most costly resource, in this case time.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"There are subtle differences between pigs' and whales' situations: most pigs that are slaughtered are bred as farm animals, not wild ones." Does that mean that if we breed humans for slavery this would be OK?
- ThirdFoundation 8y ago
- icc97 8y agoFrom Wild Kratts (apologies for quoting kids programs but it's what comes to mind): > there's no bad guys just predators and prey. My rather simplistic logic is that humans are predators and I have nothing particularly against that. For 100,000+ years we were hunter-gatherers and very good at it. Humans would kill animals because they wanted the food. Lions kill whatever they can for food, so did we. From Jared Diamond's book "Collapse", the inuit survived because they would kill whales and seals and keep the blubber for months until it was in a putrid but still edible state and managed to outlast other humans. However I have two issues: 1. We now have very good farming methods that allow us to avoid eating meat 2. We completely abstract the killing of animals to factories and trawlers and wrap it up in economics and talk about 'efficiency' of killing and wanting our meat as cheap as possible In some ways I mind less about the killing of whales because it's really hard to kill whales and they live a free life until they are killed. Factory farming of pigs, lambs, chickens and cows seems much more cruel. So where as I understand the rather animalistic nature of humans, I wish we would use our intellect to stop the cruelty. > Where do we get this sense of superiority? There was a recent article on HN [1] about the history of vegetarianism [0], there it talks about that Plato and Aristotle reasoned that humans were the only creatures with immortal souls (Pythagoras had argued earlier that animals did have souls) and the universe was for human use to do as they please. Further they argued that there was a hierarchy of beings with plants and animals at the bottom, and they didn't deserve justice because they couldn't reason. Edit: the words of Plato and Aristotle remind me of George Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm, where as Pythagoras had argued that all animals had souls and so were to some extent equal, Plato and Aristotle came back saying that humans have immortal souls or equivalently "some are more equal than others". [0]: http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2010/08/the-hidden-history-of-greco-roman-vegetarianism/ http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2010/08/the-hid... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807278
- jaxtellerSoA 8y agoWhat does age have to do with anything? By that logic we should only hunt animals with short life spans. Hunting is a scared act, and killing an animal should never be taken lightly. However, the average life span of on animal shouldn't have any bearing on the matter.
- gameswithgo 8y ago>Hunting is a scared act, pfft In practice its a bunch of drunk fat guys sitting in a blind shooting deer at the deer feeder with a gun.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoOr in the case of whaling and industrial scale fishing, a floating factory that can kill and process dozens of whales (using exploding harpoons) and/or tens of thousands of fish over the span of a few months.
- MR4D 8y ago> However, the average life span of on animal shouldn't have any bearing on the matter. True. Otherwise we’d all be eating veal, and I don’t see that happening ... ever!
- qubax 8y ago> How can any human come up with the idea of hunting creatures that are 200 years old? What does age have to do with anything? If people are hungry, they will hunt. If there are resources that we need, we'll use it. Trees grow for thousands of years, but I bet you have a home and furniture made of wood. Lobsters can live up to 100 years. People love lobster. > Where do we get this sense of superiority? Our intelligence and the fact that we are at the top of the food chain? Killer whales hunt and kill whales. Where do killer whales get their sense of superiority?
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoIn the modern day though, there's better sources of food than whales. IIRC only Japan still does it, and they do it for either specialist food or medicinal use. China and their unscientific medicine practices are one reason why there's still a lot of poaching going on.
- qubax 8y ago> In the modern day though, there's better sources of food than whales. That's why there is far less whaling today. > IIRC only Japan still does it Nope. We do it in the US ( it's now mostly our inuits). Norway, Iceland. Greenland. Russia. But considering how invested you seem on this issue, you probably knew that already.
- modzu 8y agomost of the replies to this comment are terrifying. the gist amounts to, "who cares"? we're talking about respect for life, respect for ancient life. do you think these old creatures have nothing to teach us? who cares if they are all gone? what do you people care about then? oh yeah, getting rich making apps
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gwbas1c 8y agoIt seems that whale longevity is only a recent discovery. The whale itself was a valuable resource of meat and oil. The sperm whale's oil was used for lighting, and then used for automatic transmissions through the 1960s. Until the 1970s, there was no good synthetic replacement for whale oil.
- cryptozeus 8y agoSame reason the people pluck out horns from a live rhino. Unbelievable!
- tw1010 8y agoWhat makes you assume people consider their actions before they perform them?
- billfruit 8y agoSometimes I am amazed that a single pineapple takes 2 years or more to grow, yet it is so inexpensive, and it is eaten with hardly a care that years have gone into its making.
- spiraldancing 8y agoYou can add sturgeon (source of caviar, among other things) to that list. Living fossils, been around 130+M years. Lake Sturgeon[1] reach sexual maturity at ~25 yrs, only reproduce once every 4-6 yrs, and can live 150+ yrs. They're also a popular game fish, and traditional spearfishing target of Native Americans. [1] https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/fishing/sturgeon/lakeSturgeonLifeCycle.html https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/fishing/sturgeon/lakeSturgeonLifeCy...