Whale Bores Have Lost It
by Edmund Harbord

I love whales, but I couldn't eat a whole one. There has been endless reporting on the International Commission for Whaling’s recent vote - but no-one has questioned the BBC-Greenpeace line that whaling is a Bad Thing.

Iceland, Japan and Norway wish to hunt whales, whilst the green and the good wish to stop them. The greenies produce three lines of "argument": (i) that whales are endangered (ii) that were they not endangered, it would be cruel the hunt them and (iii) that if it wasn't cruel, it is somehow immoral as whales are "special".

‘Whales have become the sacred cows of the environmental movement.’

Unfortunately, the ICW has recently admitted that the hunted species, the minke whales, are not endangered. The current flap about whaling has been triggered by this difficult realisation. How then is whaling wrong?

Is it cruel? Is the harpoon to a whale’s head more ‘wrong’ than a bolt to a cow’s head? Six cows each year are slaughtered per UK resident. There's more meat on a whale than a cow. But whales have become the sacred cows of the environmental movement.

What's so bloody special about whales? They sing, but so do birds: roughly 350million of which are tortured to death each year by British domestic cats. Will no one think of the chickens hastily gobbled by the British population?

Researchers in animal intelligence contend that whales are brighter than dogs but thicker than pigs. There are no moves to ban the bacon sarnie, as the product of a super IQ animal. Malaysian restaurants remain unmolested.

But there is a solution: privatisation! Let’s flog the rights to hunt whales to the highest bidder. Whale meat isn't that popular, and Greenpeace could buy the rights, and not exercise them. Let the cetobores and the cetovores put their money where their principles or their mouths are.

Furthermore, it would give us western epicureans the opportunity to answer the most important question: do whales taste like chicken?