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This would make some sense if we were farming dolphin. Pigs are not endangered.
by mcculley 5y ago
This would make some sense if we were farming dolphin. Pigs are not endangered.
- bryan0 5y agoNeither are Atlantic white-sided dolphins[0]. It does seem weird to me that people would get upset over this but not our own slaughter of hundreds of millions of animals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_white-sided_dolphin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_white-sided_dolphin
- jnwatson 5y agoThe general argument is that cetaceans are smart and are worthy of more protection. At the same time, pigs can be pretty smart. Too bad they are made of bacon.
- mcculley 5y agohttps://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin https://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin says there are only 300,000 of them. Killing 1,400 at a time seems like an easy way to endanger the species.
- pvaldes 5y agoWhite-sided are not common dolphins
- docdeek 5y agoAre the white-sided dolphins that are at issue here endangered? Wikipedia says they aren’t, ranked as ‘Of Least Concern’ on the conservation scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_white-sided_dolphin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_white-sided_dolphin
- mcculley 5y agohttps://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin https://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin says there are only 300,000 of them. Killing 1,400 at a time seems like an easy way to endanger the species.
- musha68k 5y agoEndangered or not, cetacean intelligence is likely on par with ours. As we get more and more certain that this is the case there will also be increasingly more moral implications here. I’m not saying that a pig in comparison has less worth by the way. Quite the contrary.
- pvaldes 5y agoThey are very pelagic and don't get close to the coast, so difficult to study. I had seen two in my life.
- mlindner 5y agoNo comment on the pigs argument, but dolphins and pilot whales are not endangered. They're ranked as "least concern".
- mcculley 5y agohttps://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin https://hwdt.org/atlantic-white-sided-dolphin says there are only 300,000 of them. Killing 1,400 at a time seems like an easy way to endanger the species. We should still be concerned.
- mlindner 5y agoThat's around 1% of the population. They breed a lot more than that every year.
- Grustaf 5y agoFarming animals is much much worse than killing wild animals. Even when I was a vegetarian for ethical reasons I would eat game, I have no moral objections at all to going out in the forest and shooting a deer for food, but raising pigs in meat factories is horrible.
- mcculley 5y agoI am also against factory farming. That is orthogonal to the argument about there being plenty of pigs/dolphins.
- Grustaf 5y agoYou said "but we're not farming dolphins". My point is that hunting dolphins is better than farming them, not worse.
- mcculley 5y agoI agree that hunting is better than farming, generally. (Not in all scenarios. I would not want to be hunted to exhaustion over a long period of suffering.) We are farming pigs and guaranteeing a supply. We are not farming dolphins. There will eventually be as many as mammoths.
- musha68k 5y agoI agree factory farming is terrible but this wasteful and gruesome killing is also terrible. Definition of vegetarian diet might be a bit stretched here. Either way you don’t condone killing all deer in a certain forest, do you? So much “game” that there won’t be any one healthy animal left?
- Grustaf 5y agoOf course not, but I don't think that is what happened here. And I am not sure it's wasteful, if they eat all the meat the will eat less of other meats. Gruesome for sure, but not more gruesome than a slaughterhouse.