Somewhere in the world a dolphin died today. Born at sea, he had spent his youth as a wayfarer of the open waves; riding rhythmic tides and relentless currents; slipping past jagged rocks and over rippled sandy bottoms; flying above thrusting sea mounts and gaping chasms; free on the wind swell. Free. And then one day, all that ended. He was captured and sold to men who imprisoned him at an aquarium, where each day thousands of your kind gaze and gawk at dolphins, as they perform stupid and demeaning tricks, and beg for food. But not this dolphin. He refused. Doomed to a life of unending sadness he simply stopped breathing and died. He was not the first to do so and he will not be the last. Your kind took little notice of his passing and for that you are a lesser people, and this is a lesser world: this endangered blue marble drifting silently through space; a place of terrible beauty and unintended cruelty that you call Earth but whalekind knows as Planet Ocean.
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Good for this self-respecting dolphin. I feel so for him and for all captured, tormented, lonely creatures of the deep who are enslaved or slaughtered by ignorant men.
ReplyDeleteI would like to ask, though: was this dolphin who refused to be demeaned being "extreme" in starving himself?
You say that the far leftists who engage in attacking the whale boats (or at least trying to stay between the whalers and the whales) are being extreme in sacrificing their own lives. I don't see it that way. I think they are trying to defend the law and the whales, which none of the governments are willing to do. I find them as brave as the Underground Railroad freedom-fighters. I haven't watched "Whale Wars," but I respect Capt. Paul Watson and the rest of the Sea Shepherd crew. Maybe I don't know enough about their tactics. I'd like to think that their raising awareness of whales and dolphins will LEAD to your suggestion: an effort to reach the children of Japan (and Norway and Iceland), because, like all children, they are eminently reachable, and responsive to compassion, to true communication, to rationality.
Thanks for posting on Change.org. Learning of your existence has brightened my day.