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…

Doomed By a Clash of Cultures

Brave but foolhardy acts of protest on the high seas, and bluster and bombast on the safe side of the shore, will never stop the Japanese from slaughtering my kind, either in the crimson-flecked windspray of the Southern Ocean, or the blood-soaked bays of Tajii. This tragic affair is no longer about the slaughter of tens of thousands of whales and dolphins each year. It has devolved into what the Japanese government sees as an imperialistic assault upon their culture. And Australia’s recent threat to take Japan to the International Court of Justice over their annual Antarctic whale hunts has only served to further widen Japan’s sense of isolation from the rest of the world: a cultural remoteness formed over two millennia that will not be bridged by fast boats or slow courts.
In his brilliant book, “The Cultural Imperative: Global Trends in the 21st Century,” Richard D. Lewis points out that in any interaction with the Japanese, “What is said is actually of minor importance. How it is said, who says it, and when it is said are the vital ingredients.” Unless the Americans, and Australians, and the rest of the anti-whaling world stop shouting, and until the Japanese start listening, my kind will be doomed by this lethal clash of cultures.
I pray that thought leaders on both sides of this contentious debate will see the light; and even though I realize how futile such a prayer may be, that does not lessen its sincerity, or the sense of hope behind it.