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Pastimes : Makah whale hunters are they savages? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: c.horn who wrote (15)	5/19/1999 10:24:00 PM
From: Level Head	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 157

What a bunch of hypocrites..... Is a cow's life less important than a whale's? I will endeavor to answer your questions from my own perspective. The short answer is "Yes", a cow's life is less important to me. Those who know me have heard one of my thumb rules: "No more than one major red meat entré per meal". So, I do not operate from the vegetarian viewpoint, although I understand it. Most cetaceans (whales and porpoises) have a comparatively large brain capacity. Sperm whales, for example, have the largest brain on the planet, at 17 pounds -- much larger than Homo sapiens. Moreover, the structure of this brain, including convolutions and other details that are a reasonable gauge of mammalian species' intelligence for more familiar animals, suggest that whales may be philosophers beyond all human merit. Certainly well developed language skills have been widely documented. So, for reasons of moral superiority perhaps, I don't wish to eat them. There's another, more "technical" issue here, in that it is nearly impossible to slaughter whales in a humane way. Not that we are all that humane with food animals, but we should be and could be. Humans are opportunistic omnivores, and we have no reason to be ashamed of our carnivore heritage. Much of the "conventional wisdom" regarding cholesterol is media-inspired nonsense, sadly, but that's another story. Until we meat again... Level Head

To: c.horn who wrote (15)	5/19/1999 11:43:00 PM
From: David Montgomery	Respond to of 157

Hypocrytes? Probably. The tough part of that is how could you be anything else? Do you not eat meat? Do you not eat vegetables? Do you not eat anything? Then you get artificial meals and you wind up eating all the dead stuff from cows, whales, trees, vegetables, rocks, and whatever else the scientists can find to convince you that you aren't killing cows, whales, trees, vegetables, or rocks. It's all phony. In the end, we're somewhere in the food chain. I hope that someday the conservationists and the rednecks and the cowboys and the environmentalists figure out that we have to be in the food chain in a merciful way. If not merciful, I hope we show up in the food chain in a rational way. Whatever.