Stranded whales

Forest and Bird, Issue 280, 1 May 1996, Page 2

Stranded whales

Wellington (abridged)

Bruce Comfort

I enjoyed Kevin Smiths lucid and thoughtful contribution "Should whales be ‘rescued’ at all?" (November). Whale pushing is definitely not, in my opinion, any of our business, and, as I’ve been at pains to point out to friends and family, I’m very glad that some self-righteous air breather wasn't there waiting when my ancestors first came struggling out of the primordial sea, all eager to push them back "in their own best interest". Apart from the long recorded history of whale strandings and the positive (human) benefits

of that to some indigenous peoples, and despite the fact that there might be a tenuous link between human activities (radio frequency fields, sound waves in the oceans, pollution etc) and increased strandings, the fact is that conservationists can’t have it both ways. Either whales are the most intelligent animals in the sea, in which case they might just know what they’re doing, or they are dumb like fishes. Then we could look at a number of different approaches to strandings. Kevin Smith suggests that leaving carcases to rot could be the natural approach, but interventionist approaches too could be part of a workable strategy to come to terms with the strangeness and obvious waste that these incidents express. Because they have big brown eyes, people get sentimental about whales. But of course no one gives two hoots about the tonnes of orange roughy, with their cold steel-grey eyes, that we pull up with each trawl from the Chatham Rise. But one seal in the net and all hell breaks loose. Oh, and if we are serious about wanting to share the planet with whales while we are here then we could think about setting up a butchery flying squad to process stranded whales quickly and hygienically.

With suitable amendments to the Marine Mammals Act, deep frozen and attractively packaged cuts of whale meat, sent to Japan with a note that "this is strictly your quota of whale meat for 1996" and that "therefore any whale boats seen in the southern oceans will be sunk" could, in the short run,

see this crazy state of affairs behind us. Whale pushing has got to be one of the-strangest manifestations of human kindness that I’ve seen.