Good Bye And Good Luck

I began writing this blog a year ago and during that time, it has been read over 3,600 times by people living in 57 countries around the world; people like you who care about whales and dolphins. I sincerely appreciate your patronage but I must confess that I wish I could have reached many, many more of you. I suppose that with the catastrophes, corruption, and chaos that mankind is currently facing, the plight of whales and dolphins is just not that important. Therefore, I have decided to take a hiatus from writing this blog; quite frankly, I do not know if I will ever be back. In parting, I will leave you with a poem from my book, The Tempest’s Roar: it is a prayer for all those in peril on the sea, including the whales and dolphins with whom we share this planet; this tiny blue marble drifting silently through space that we call Earth but they know as Planet Ocean.

Oh Great And Restless Sea

Hear us oh great and restless sea,
oh wondrous ocean deep and wide.
Your boundaries all beings keep,
your storms and tempests we abide.
Pray let us pass in the days to come,
free from thy wrath, safe on thy tides.
That we may cross thy mighty plains,
and suffer not like those who died.
And in the end, with our journey done,
may we to thee simple sojourners be.
Once here in time and place, then gone,
from thee oh great and restless sea.

Take care all, perhaps one day we will meet again…

You Humans Are A Curious Lot

Four million years ago, when your ancestors first walked erect, you were herbivores. By that time, my ancestors, the earliest whales and dolphins, had been swimming through the oceans for over forty million years, and the interaction between our two species was minimal. Two million years later, you became hunter/warriors, running around on your two little feet, clubbing and stabbing to death anything and everything that walked or crawled on land, including your fellow man; but still the interaction between us was limited. Ten thousand years ago, the inevitable happened: you took your killing ways to sea and began hunting my kind, but your methods were primitive and posed no serious threat to us. Thus, for nearly four million years, we co-existed peacefully.
But all that changed in the early 17th century when you began whaling on a commercial scale, and by the 19th century, you had taken your predatory skills to a whole new level, literally slaughtering hundreds of thousands of my kind. For nearly four centuries, this butchery continued unabated, driving many of us to the edge of extinction; until finally in 1986, a caring majority of you decided to bring commercial whaling to an end…sort of. Tragically, some among you, those living in Japan, Iceland, and Norway, still believe that it is their God-given right, their cultural prerogative, to perpetuate the slaughter.
And yet, even as this brutal bloodlust continues, others among your kind work passionately to bring the killing to an end through brave acts on the high seas, proposals submitted to the International Whaling Commission, and legal action brought before the International Court of Justice. You humans are a curious lot; the same DNA that makes some of you cold-blooded killers, makes others peacemakers. And meanwhile, caught squarely in the middle, my kind watches, and waits, and hopes…