Dolphins and, perhaps, whales are pretty intelligent creatures. In fact, they are so intelligent that some scientists think their consciousness is sufficiently humanlike to justify giving them rights that we don’t even extend to human embryos and fetuses. I can only imagine the wingnuts’ minds exploding. “I can’t harpoon a whale, but my girlfriend can get an abortion?”
I don’t really have an opinion on this topic. Life feeds on life. Some people are cool with that, and others spend all their waking lives wishing it weren’t so. What makes a creature above killing and grilling other than same-species solidarity? Is degree of consciousness the key? Is that why dolphins don’t eat humans?
As should be obvious, I’ll talk about anything to avoid pretending to care about who successfully bought an Oscar Award.
About to go to bed and don’t have time to elaborate, but I suspect if we’re not all dead from global warming or nuclear annihilation, that dolphins/whales/chimps/gorillas will be extended certain human rights before the turn of the century.
“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
I agree seabe.
What we constantly forget is how new all this research is. WWII was the first anti-bacterial war, basic DNA understanding is only about 60 years old, and brain research is younger than that. We are at the beginning of understanding biology, not at the end.
And I don’t stop at great apes and dolphins and whales. I honestly believe humankind will eventually have to re-evaluate what sentience means. We are a long way from there. But some day they won’t be talking drone/torture crimes, but deeper crimes.
.
We all have cannibals in our ancestry.
Dried ears are like potato chips to a cannibal.
.
Flipper wants his MTV.
Religion may have started as a way to deal with the guilt of killing for food.
Intelligence is not a litmus test sort of thing, animals have just what they need to succeed. Think of it as biological processing power, some have a great deal and others not so much, and it’s a continuum across the species. It’s why a virus can never highjack your body; there’s not enough biological processing power in a virus to drive a human. Not that it doesn’t try, it succeeds long enough to perpetuate the species. But it’s a dead end for that individual virus organism, and that’s the rub: humans are hung up on individualism. Some theory holds that the gene is the real organism, the animal is just the meat that carries it.
That said, it wasn’t so long ago in this country we where still treating humans as we do animals. Still do in some places.
We are (human and otherwise) all fishing from the same fishing hole, and are now depleting the food species of of the large whales so that many recovering populations will soon face starvation, necessitating culling.
That is why whale may be on some people’s plates.
I wish horse were on more plates in the US. Obviously not just any horse (considering the chemicals we put in most horses the beyond what even agribusiness considers acceptable for eating) but I would like us not to ban the eating of animals on grounds of their being cute or being used for pets.
No. Dolphins are universally dicks to humans. Dolphins would eat us if they could figure out how to do it successfully. Don’t know about whales though.
Also, much prefer Argo getting the best picture over zero dark thirty.
Not that anyone is still reading this thread – but people don’t eat dolphins. At least, not the intelligent kind. Those are a mammal species, related to whales, also called porpoises.
The dolphin that people eat is a completely different animal. It’s a large game fish.
To avoid confusion, restaurants have taken to calling the fishy dolphin mahi-mahi (the Hawaiian name). It’s also called the dorado and the dolphinfish.