Japanese whalers hunt humpbacks

[frigidmagi]

BBC

A Japanese whaling fleet has set sail aiming to harpoon humpback whales for the first time in decades.

The fleet is conducting its largest hunt in the South Pacific - it has instructions to kill up to 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks.

The humpback hunt is the first since a mid-1960s global ban and has drawn strong protests from environmentalists.

Commercial whaling was stopped in 1986 but Japan is permitted whaling in the name of scientific research.

Four whaling ships, including the lead craft Nisshin Maru, set off from the southern port of Shimonoseki on Sunday.

The 239-man mission plans to kill more than 900 minke whales as well as fin whales and humpbacks, in a South Pacific whale hunt that will run until mid-April.

The 8,000-metric ton Nisshin Maru was crippled by a fire on a whaling mission in the Antarctic in March. One crew member was killed.

A Greenpeace campaign ship will be following the Japanese fleet.

Sensitive mammals

Tokyo's plan to target the humpback - which was hunted to near extinction four decades ago - has drawn condemnation from environmentalists.

Children wave off whaling vessels, 18 November 2007
Crowds gathered to wave off the whaling boats

"Humpbacks are very sensitive and live in close-knit pods so even one death can be extremely damaging," Greenpeace spokesman Junichi Sato said.

Japanese fisheries officials insist both humpback and fin populations are back to sustainable levels.

"Humpback whales in our research area are rapidly recovering," said fisheries spokesman Hideki Moronuki.

"Taking 50 humpbacks from a population of tens of thousands will have no significant impact whatsoever."

Mr Moronuki said killing whales allowed marine biologists to study their internal organs.

Meat from Japan's scientific catch is sold commercially but Japanese officials deny that the mission plans to make a profit.

Tokyo argues that whaling is an ancient Japanese tradition, and has pushed unsuccessfully at the International Whaling Commission to reverse the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling.

Environmentalists say Japan's research programme is a pretext for keeping the whaling industry alive.

Japan vexes me when it does shit like this.

[LadyTevar]

Why do they need to hunt for 'science'? Every other nation manages their science without KILLING.

[Comrade Tortoise]

I will rant when I get home... dont have the time for it, though I have already done so on SDN

[Comrade Tortoise]

Now for the rant I promised.

I have done this before, but...

The status quo with international whaling is fucking disgusting. COmmercial whaling is basically illegal in name only because the pro-whaling factions in the IWC manage to force concessions for research. This research, usually "studies on population structure and distribution" is as far as I know, almost never published in reputable journals, most of them are published in the journal Mammal Study. I can let you guess what country that journal is published in... nah... JAPAN! A lot of the others are published in the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management. This is published by the International Whaling Commission. I can literally read the titles and tell you whether the data was obtained through whaling. For example.

Relationship between serum sex hormone concentrations and histology of seminiferous tubules of captured baleen whales in the western north pacific during the feeding season

The pattern of ovarian development in the prepubertal Antarctic minke whale (Balaenoptera bonaerensis)

Surfacing interval of Minke whale Balaenoptera bonaerensis in Antarctic

this one has a full citation

Okamura, Hiroshi, Kitakado, Toshihide, Mori, Mitsuyo
An improved method for line transect sampling in Antarctic minke whale surveys
Journal of Cetacean Research and Management 7 (2): 97-106 FAL 2005

You want to know how informative the hormone correlates of seminiferous tubules are in minke whales... to anyone is? It isnt. Flat out, the information is nifty, but no ethics committee in any country but japan would ever consider the benefit to outweigh the cost, and if they did they would insist on using naturally beached whales and species of opportunity like Pilot Whales, and generalize the findings.

This "research" is a sham. A cover for those nations whos people enjoy feeding on the flesh of intelligent creatures.

[frigidmagi]

When you should meet the WiC on the road... Kill him! (modified from a Japanese saying for super extra irony)

CT I suggest when you met them, you skip the speech and go straight to the harpoon.

[Batman]

The USN has tons of SSNs with nothing to do, excellent active sonars and probably lots of Mk 37s/early generation 48s in storage. I say we send them out, they pretend to be whales, and when the whalers try to harpoon them, they return fire in self-defense.

Yes, I know, but a man can dream...

[Norseman]

The status of whaling is indeed disgusting. Here we have a renewable resource, a source of healthy and cheap food, and because of environmentalist lies and misinformation we're not able to harvest it!

People seem to believe in the existance of some soon to be extinguished "Super Whale" with all the qualities of the multiple whale species combined. Conveniently ignored that there are several species of whale, and that the ones that are being hunted are not in any way, shape, or form threatened by extinction.

Why don't you go to the High North Alliance and get some facts, instead of just listening to one side of the argument? Try this for size The Whaling Argument: Explore the Green Route!

Meanwhile I have this to say: We'll stop hunting, and eating, minke whales when you stop eating cows; both of them are equally threatened by extinction under the current regime.

By the way if God didn't want us to eat whales, why did he make them taste so gosh darned yummy?

[Comrade Tortoise]

Wow... just...wow. The circular logic anthropocentrism makes my head hurt

[frigidmagi]

It may make your head hurt but you still present an argument against it, rather then just complaining about it.

[Shark Bait]

here is one, Aqua culture is fucked. oceanic ecosystems are out of wack all around the world mostly because everyone has become a fan of just about anything that swims we have resorted to eating the most ugly of fish because we ate all the other ones. See Chilean sea bass and when someone says "its a renewable resource" yeah its not always that easy. History has shown us that basically like everything else in the sea any whales hunted will be over harvested either accidentally(bad numbers reporting) or on purpose(poaching). Not only that you cant farm raise whales very easily, and even if you could commercial "fisheries" have a tendency to cause lots of nitrogen pollution which just ends up killing the fish and everything around them in the end.

Aside from That Right Whales, and Humpbacks are not in the best of positions both of which the Japanese have been illegally harvesting. Both species were really screwed over when industrialization of whaling came into play. And lastly this is not an emotional argument, this is a top down trophic collapse waiting to happen.

[Comrade Tortoise]

It may make your head hurt but you still present an argument against it, rather then just complaining about it.

Norseman's post was satirical, he was pointing at nutbags and making sarcastic comments. If you want me to rip them apart, I will do so.

The status of whaling is indeed disgusting. Here we have a renewable resource

No. We have a non-renewable non-resource. Non renewable because the populations are not stable. Whales in general typically do not exist in large enough numbers, or reproduce fast enough to harvest commercially. This becomes an even more important point as the habitats of the commercially important spacies are degraded by climate change and our own over-fishing. Sorry Scandanavians, the argument does not fly with anyone who is not oin your pay-roll. Even with regulation, our harvests of animals with biological traits far more conducive to sustainable harvesting are collapsing, and you think whales are going to do any better? Sorry.

Wait, I said non-resource too didnt I? Well, the above presupposes that we have a right to harvest them at all. And guess what, we dont. It does not matter what ethical system one uses. If you are a hedonistic utilitarian, the capacity of the whale to suffer exceeds the pleasure we gain from eating it, because it is an intelligent being. Maybe not as smart as an adult human, but probably about as smart as a small child. We dont eat kids...

If a preference or interests utilitarian, the same basic rules apply just substitute fulfillment of preferences or the consideration if interests for direct suffering/pleasure.

If you are a Kantian, the arguemnt can be made that the whale has a certain amount of rational agency and thus should not be treated as a means and not also as an end.

Then there is the pesky idea that we actually have direct obligations to the ecosystem in which the whales exist, and as animals that are very important in their ecosystems, they should not be messed with.

People seem to believe in the existance of some soon to be extinguished "Super Whale" with all the qualities of the multiple whale species combined. Conveniently ignored that there are several species of whale, and that the ones that are being hunted are not in any way, shape, or form threatened by extinction.

Bullshit, for the reasons given. Moreover, pretty much all whale species are social, and they pretty much are too intelligent for us to have anything even remotely close to a right to kill.

Meanwhile I have this to say: We'll stop hunting, and eating, minke whales when you stop eating cows; both of them are equally threatened by extinction under the current regime.

This is sarcasm right? because it is bullshit on its face.

By the way if God didn't want us to eat whales, why did he make them taste so gosh darned yummy?

Well first off, prove god exists...

[Norseman]

Prove that whales are as intelligent as children: Brains, Behaviour and Intelligence in Cetaceans Simply put if you think whales are too intelligent to be eaten then you shouldn't eat pigs or cows either.

As for non-renewable: The International Whaling Commission's most recent information on estimated abundance a minimum of 125 000 minkewhales in the northern hemisphere alone.

The Norwegian Whaling Quota in 2006 was 1052 animals, bit high due to unused quotas from 2004 and 2005. That's less than one percent of the minimum estimate for the northern Hemisphere. By comparison each year you'd cull approximately 10% of the moose or elk population.

Whales are animals like any others, subject to the same laws of nature. If you claim that there's something unique, and special, and fantastic about whales then the burden of evidence is on you.

P.S. Even the Norwegian environmentalist organisations such as Young Friends of the Earth Norway , Bellona, and the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature support the current level of whaling. These are not exactly stooges of Big Industry or Big Whaling, Bellona for instance is against off shore oil drilling, but happily supports whaling.

[frigidmagi]

Quick interjection here: Norse Humpback whales and cows are nowhere near each other in terms of intelligence. The humpback and certain other species of whale have proven a high level of intelligence in realms of problem solving and pattern recogization. Hell humpbacks even have a rudimentary language. So the analogy doesn't really work.

[Comrade Tortoise]

I will have a bigger post up tonight, my time right now is limited. The brain size argument is deceptive and I never use it. The reasoning? Because it is a false analogy. You are comparing the brains of two highly divergent organisms and expecting their brains to have reached intelligence through a similar pathway. Bad scandanavian! The behavior is much more telling. Will have a list of references when time permits me to search for them

Also, in the future, I would suggest you go to you know... peer reviewed literature, and not political organizations for your information. That is all for now

[Norseman]

Quick interjection here: Norse Humpback whales and cows are nowhere near each other in terms of intelligence. The humpback and certain other species of whale have proven a high level of intelligence in realms of problem solving and pattern recogization. Hell humpbacks even have a rudimentary language. So the analogy doesn't really work.

Pigs have also proven a high level of intelligence in terms of problem solving, in fact pigs have been proven to be more intelligent than dogs (who are also social creatures). Nevertheless people aren't arguing that we shouldn't eat pigs. The professor responsible for the Penn State study rated pigs second only to chimpanzees, and they learned many tasks faster than chimpanzees.

Quite frankly if you want to ban whaling then you also have to try to ban bacon, anything else is not ethically consistent. Indeed if you want to ban whaling you should be EVEN MORE eager to stop the eating of pigs, since pigs generally live fairly miserable lives up to the point that they're slaughtered.

By the way (this is to Comrade Tortoise) the article I posted on whale intelligence and brain size was written by Dr. Margaret Klinowska, a professor of Cambridge University and a member of the Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. The High North Alliance only quoted it.

Admittedly it's somewhat old, but that's not the complaint you made against it.

As for political organisations... I just mentioned the three most important Norwegian environmental groups, all of whom support whaling on ecological and ethical grounds. One of them (Bellona) is so extreme that it's against offshore drilling! So these are hardly the kind of people to be persuaded by the whaling lobby (which by the way is tiny, and non-existant compared to the oil lobby).

I posted links to the three main Norwegian environmental organisations, if you think whaling is wrong why don't you call them? Or mail them for that matter, I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear your point of view. In fact if you really want to do some good why don't you try arguing with them? If you can persuade any of them to oppose whaling you will have advanced your cause considerably!

Go ahead, the links are there, and they all speak perfectly good English.

Anyway for anyone actually interested in the other side of the argument you can go here and find a big list of websites. If you've only ever come across anti websites it might be a good idea to listen to the other side for a change.

[Norseman]

BTW I may have been a bit hasty, I spoke to some qualified people, and they confirmed that it was very hard to differentiate between the relative intelligence of two different species. That said the various whales were definately clever animals, especially the more predatory ones.

However I missed an important point: "[The whales] are as intelligent as a child, and we don't eat children." The reason that we don't eat children is that they're human. Even if they're at a developmental level where they're not sapient or even fully self-aware we still grant them honorary human rights.

Some people have argued, with more justification IMHO, that chimpanzees can reach the level of a small child. Nevertheless I wouldn't see any moral issue with shooting, killing and eating a chimpanzee. Except of course that they're threatened with extinction in some areas.

A different species wouldn't have to reach fully human standards before I would consider it morally wrong to kill it (except for self defence, etc). I'd consider something on the level of Homo Habilis / Homo Erectus to be too developed to hunt for food. E.g. the ability to use secondary tools, a tool to make other tools.

I would give the children of such a species "honorary personhood" just as I would to a human child.

However the developmental level of Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus would have to be higher than that of your average toddler.

In short we seem to have a disagreement that is fundamentally based on morality. For the record I reject utilitarianism, I believe that animals beneath a certain threshold can be used to benefit sapient beings. I do oppose cruelty to animals, but not due to utilitarian demands. Call it Humanism if you will.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Quite frankly if you want to ban whaling then you also have to try to ban bacon, anything else is not ethically consistent. Indeed if you want to ban whaling you should be EVEN MORE eager to stop the eating of pigs, since pigs generally live fairly miserable lives up to the point that they're slaughtered.

Indeed. I have moral problems with factory farming in general. And I am somewhat uncomfortable eating pork, especially pork raised under such conditions. However provided a pig is killed painlessly then my objections die. It is somewhat difficult to kill a whale painlessly isnt it? What with the harpoons or in some cases anti-tank rounds...

Still a false analogy though as the situations are not the same. Pigs have been selectively bred as food. They literally exist FOR our use, because we created them for that purpose through millenia of selective breeding. The whale does not exist for our purposes. And neither do chimps, orangutans, or gorillas.

Admittedly it's somewhat old, but that's not the complaint you made against it.

14 years. Given that research in cetacean cognition is about 30 decades behind research into primate intelligence, that thing is the equivalent of a primate paper from the 60s. As for the article itself, the original source was in their own publication, if you check the top. So no, they did not quote it. They commissioned and published it. And it did not go through peer review.

As for her position on whale intelligence, She does not study the actual behavior of the organisms, the mere fact that she has been known to compare the intelligence of a humpback with that of a cow, despite the behavior observed within them and other cetaceans that indicate otherwise, renders her misinformed at best and deliberately misleading at worst

Studies of the internal structure of carefully preserved dolphin brains using a variety of techniques (e.g. Kesarev, Malofeyeva and Trykova, 1977; Morgane, Jacobs and Galaburda, 1986; Garey and Revishchin, 1990; Glazer, Morgane and Leranth, 1990) show that these animals have not developed the latest stage of brain evolution, characteristic of land mammals. It is thought that this line of evolution began about 50 million years ago in land mammals, whereas the cetacean ancestors returned to the water some 70 million years ago, well before this stage was reached.

This is idiotic. Why? because evolution does not progress in stepwise "stages" progressing toward a common goal. And the lack of a given brain structure, one that evolved after they diverged from land mammals, is no indication of their intelligence because it is more likely that evolution would have taken a different route to achieving the same ends.

A lot of behavioral work has been done in the 14 years since this un reviewed paper was published. Here is the citation for a decent review.

Simmonds, Mark Peter. Into the Brains of Whales. Applied animal behaviour science [0168-1591] yr:2006 vol:100 iss:1-2 pg:103 -116

In this review, the author looks at the methodological problems of studying whale, and in fact all animal intelligence, and then does a review of the informative behaviors seen in dolphins and orca, with a look at the harder to study baleen whales, which indicate some of the same patterns (despite being very hard to study)

These patterns include self awareness, the ability to be taught artificial human languages, obvious grief for the dead, abstract thinking and forethought among other behaviors.

Now as for your moral stance. I will flat out say that it is inconsistent with any reasonable metaphysics.

The reason that we don't eat children is that they're human. Even if they're at a developmental level where they're not sapient or even fully self-aware we still grant them honorary human rights.

From what derives these rights? Are they a metaphysical property of the universe? Why are humans the only beings that have rights? The holes in rights based arguments, especially ones that beg the question and assume that only humans have them, are the size of the red spot on Jupiter. Are rights an inherent part of the universe or are they just a logical construct? If they are a part of the universe where do they come from? (the only answer to this question is a deity BTW) If they are a logical construct then A) there is a more fundamental principle that we can and should appeal too, and B) it is inconsistent to exclude other organisms A Priori

There is a way around that, and that is to recognize that our notions of morality in the end come from our evolved sense of empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another individual. From this we can derive real consequentialist ethical systems. We do not sympathize witht eh victim of a crime because their rights were violated. We sympathize with them and feel moral outrage at the perpetrator because the victim is suffering and we know what it is like to suffer. We have created elaborate systems of morality in order to systematize this emotional reaction. The problem is, we can empathize with every other species, and to the extent to which we can is the extent to which we should take into account that suffering. When you shoot a chimpanzee, listen to it scream. Is that suffering good? What if it shot you?

What about a sapient android? Or an alien species? The moment you grant a priori ethical consideration only to hominids, you open up a HUGE can of worms.

And that is only an argument regarding inter-individual relations. There are other arguments derived from other metaphysical precepts which grant direct moral consideration to ecosystems. But those do not need to be touched here. Or should they be?

A different species wouldn't have to reach fully human standards before I would consider it morally wrong to kill it (except for self defence, etc). I'd consider something on the level of Homo Habilis / Homo Erectus to be too developed to hunt for food. E.g. the ability to use secondary tools, a tool to make other tools.

In other words you have defined the qualities which lead to moral consideration such that only highly derived hominids possess them, and have done so with no justification. The argument is circular. 'We only grant moral consideration to humans because only humans are developed enough to be granted moral considerationâ€

[Norseman]

Quite frankly if you want to ban whaling then you also have to try to ban bacon, anything else is not ethically consistent. Indeed if you want to ban whaling you should be EVEN MORE eager to stop the eating of pigs, since pigs generally live fairly miserable lives up to the point that they're slaughtered.

Indeed. I have moral problems with factory farming in general. And I am somewhat uncomfortable eating pork, especially pork raised under such conditions. However provided a pig is killed painlessly then my objections die. It is somewhat difficult to kill a whale painlessly isnt it? What with the harpoons or in some cases anti-tank rounds...

Still a false analogy though as the situations are not the same. Pigs have been selectively bred as food. They literally exist FOR our use, because we created them for that purpose through millenia of selective breeding. The whale does not exist for our purposes. And neither do chimps, orangutans, or gorillas.

They exist for our use? You complain about my philosophy and then you say that a group of animals exist for our use? What kind of bizarroland Aristotelan Teleological analysis did you do to get at this one?

BTW do you also want to outlaw hunting? It is certainly just as painful as whaling, more so in many cases if you look at the shenanigans of the average hunter.

A different species wouldn't have to reach fully human standards before I would consider it morally wrong to kill it (except for self defence, etc). I'd consider something on the level of Homo Habilis / Homo Erectus to be too developed to hunt for food. E.g. the ability to use secondary tools, a tool to make other tools.

In other words you have defined the qualities which lead to moral consideration such that only highly derived hominids possess them, and have done so with no justification. The argument is circular. 'We only grant moral consideration to humans because only humans are developed enough to be granted moral considerationâ€

[The Silence and I]

A different species wouldn't have to reach fully human standards before I would consider it morally wrong to kill it (except for self defence, etc). I'd consider something on the level of Homo Habilis / Homo Erectus to be too developed to hunt for food. E.g. the ability to use secondary tools, a tool to make other tools.

What about species which lack dexterous manipulators? No matter how intelligent a dolphin may or may not be it can hardly hold a primary tool in its mouth let alone create a secondary tool for its use.

I cannot fail to notice your criteria automatically fail all cetaceans, which strikes me as being a self-serving set of criteria.

[Shark Bait]

All right I have weigh in here for a second, yes domestic farm animals exist for our purposes because we have selected them for traits to such an extent that they are not recognizable from their wild forms anymore. Wild pigs like the boar have tusks are very smart and exist for the purpose to dig up forests and provide food for wolves. Domestic pigs don’t have tusks lie around eat garbage and become so incredibly fat that they can barely move and would not last a night in the wild so yes domestic animals exist for us to eat.

Second just because something is smart or dumb does not make it food or not food hell we eat octopi and they are smarter than many people I deal with on a day to day basis, they use found tools and practically make them. I’ve seen octopi take tools away from people and then taunt the people with the tools.

Finally the meat of my issue with this, whales are not cows, nor are they elk or pigs. In short they are not terrestrial mammals, we cant argue that its ok to hunt whales because we hunt elk. We hunt elk in the numbers we do because we killed all the wolves, and now we have to do their job, luckily we haven’t quite screwed up the whale’s habitats and eco systems that badly, yet. Can’t argue that they are cows or pigs for above reasons and they have not and as far as all current data shows cannot be domesticated. Whales take several years to grow to maturity or at least full size, they need a good amount of space to move around and you cant put them into big herds like you can with cows. As stated before aquaculture is fucked, and attempting to farm raise aquatic creatures usually leads to very bad things. World wide fish populations are down, and eating whales just seems like a trophic collapse and another over fishing disaster waiting to happen. Additionally even if whales are treated like elk how often do you go down to your grocery store and say “hey butcher give me a pound of venisonâ€

[Norseman]

A different species wouldn't have to reach fully human standards before I would consider it morally wrong to kill it (except for self defence, etc). I'd consider something on the level of Homo Habilis / Homo Erectus to be too developed to hunt for food. E.g. the ability to use secondary tools, a tool to make other tools.

What about species which lack dexterous manipulators? No matter how intelligent a dolphin may or may not be it can hardly hold a primary tool in its mouth let alone create a secondary tool for its use.

I cannot fail to notice your criteria automatically fail all cetaceans, which strikes me as being a self-serving set of criteria.

There are other tests that might work too, but... Chimpanzees and whales can't do it, do you think they're more or less intelligent than those? If an aquatic mammal is less or as intelligent as either one then they fail the test.

P.S. Actually I can go into the local stores and buy both minke whale and elk meat products (mostly sausages mind, but venison too). In fact a popular snack sausage is made from elk meat.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Sorry for the long delay. Finals existed and I realized once they were over that I could have a social life again...

They exist for our use? You complain about my philosophy and then you say that a group of animals exist for our use? What kind of bizarroland Aristotelan Teleological analysis did you do to get at this one?

It is actually very simple. We created them. As SB said, do you think cows and chickens evolved under normal conditions? No. They are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding. We literally created them, and because we did it with a goal in mind that imparts a teleos. A purpose. Ought we be cruel to them? Which is why I am morally opposed to factory farming (despite not being able to realistically do anything about it)

BTW do you also want to outlaw hunting? It is certainly just as painful as whaling, more so in many cases if you look at the shenanigans of the average hunter.

A multifaceted approach is needed here. Hunting of ungulates is ecologically necessary. I dont like it, but we have butchered the predators that keep their populations in check. Because of this, ungulates will overshoot their carrying capacity and not reach a dynamic equilibrium with their environments. Predators like wolves and bears normally keep their populations stable, without them, ungulates will over breed and massively overshoot their carrying capacity, after some lag time they will eat all their forage and their population will plummet, but not after they have eliminated the ability of the forest to regenerate. What basically happens is the forest (If we are talking about a forest, the dynamics of other environments are a bit different) becomes nothing but old growth. And that is not a healthy forest. Moreover, we use a lot of the environments that this happens in. A Watershed for example. In the end analysis, it is only the ecologically naive that balk at the culling of ungulates. How it is done is another issue entirely.

However, good hunters eat what they take and follow the regulations set forth by the management agency. Provides the hunters managing a hunt follow those guidelines, I take no issue with that.

Additionally, false analogy. Cetaceans (at least some species) are smart enough to comprehend death and are capable of abstract thinking (watch a grey whale lift its offspring out of the water to keep it away from orca and come up with a better explanation) They transmit information culturally (documented in orca and other dolphins) and develop social connections such that some species have been observed to mourn the dead (orca) You think the two are similar in levels of suffering? Are you that dense? Even if you killed an individual instantly others in its social group suffer as a result. Not the case with ungulates, many of which travel in loose herds and have no deep social bonds to speak of other than perhaps the parent-offspring bond.

Urm no that's not a circular argument... perhaps you should look up Circular Argument in the dictionary or something. The argument goes something like this: There's a boundary past which your species as a whole, or you as an individual act of nature/science, deserve consideration as a fully sapient being. So far the only species we know of that crosses this boundary is the human race.

Except the pesky little fact that the boundary is completely arbitrary and gets defined in such a way as to exclude a priori every other species. It is circular because you are saying "Humans are the only beings worthy of direct moral consideration because moral consideration is given only to beings which possess characteristics which I have defined as being exclusive to humans"

A casebook circular argument. Dont try to bullshit me.

That quality is, among other things, the ability to use secondary tools (e.g. tools to make other tools. Rather than primary tools such as certain apes use).

And why is THAT your criteria? Because you say so?

And I remember that during the 1960s and 1970s we were all told how chimpanzees would be able to communicate by sign language, maybe to the point of becoming full citizens. Hum, whatever happened to that?

They can use sign language. They can even teach it to their offspring. Of course, there are several things wrong with this argument

A) it is a non-sequiteur and a red herring
B) It was not cognitive scientists doing that, to my knowledge.
C)Even if I grant you that, it supports my argument, not hinders it, because by your line of reasoning, the author you cite is full of shit.

Indicate patterns yes, patterns that also animals like say elephants display. Indeed elephants have such qualities to a considerable degree. DO you also think that it's wrong to shoot and kill elephants?

Yes, unless the elephants have gotten themselves drunk on fermented sugar cane and are on a rampage that makes drunk Marines look like a pack of mormon school children on a picnic.

For our argument we will consider only cullings in by legitimate authorities.

Seeing as there is seldom a real reason to cull elephant herds...

If I were to use purely secular reasoning I'd find it impossible to create an intellectually acceptable argument against animal cruelty.

That just means you need to do more reading

[LadyTevar]

ahem
Whale Hunt Dropped

Does this mean we can drop this discussion as well?

[Comrade Tortoise]

Well, we could, but it wouldnt be nearly as fun

[Norseman]

Sorry for the long delay. Finals existed and I realized once they were over that I could have a social life again...

They exist for our use? You complain about my philosophy and then you say that a group of animals exist for our use? What kind of bizarroland Aristotelan Teleological analysis did you do to get at this one?

It is actually very simple. We created them. As SB said, do you think cows and chickens evolved under normal conditions? No. They are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding. We literally created them, and because we did it with a goal in mind that imparts a teleos. A purpose. Ought we be cruel to them? Which is why I am morally opposed to factory farming (despite not being able to realistically do anything about it)

So, just to make sure I got this right, if by some chance over a period of centuries we had selectively bred a type of whale, as we have cattle or pigs, then it'd suddenly be alright to kill and eat them?

Mind you I still find it a bit odd that, given your earlier statements, you can accept a teleological argument at all.

BTW do you also want to outlaw hunting? It is certainly just as painful as whaling, more so in many cases if you look at the shenanigans of the average hunter.

<snip need for culling>

Additionally, false analogy. Cetaceans (at least some species) are smart enough to comprehend death and are capable of abstract thinking (watch a grey whale lift its offspring out of the water to keep it away from orca and come up with a better explanation)

Look pretty much every single mammal out there will go to considerable lengths to protect its offspring. When any mammal sees a predator the instinct is to get its offspring out of the predators path, or placing its own body in the predators path (if the adult is big enough), or trying to distract the predator by leading it away from the offspring.

Is a deer suddenly imbued with mystical qualities because it will try to lead away predators while the fawn presses towards the ground? There's other species who will, in case of danger, pick their young up by the scruff and carry them to safety. Do they have mystical qualities too?

They transmit information culturally (documented in orca and other dolphins) and develop social connections such that some species have been observed to mourn the dead (orca) You think the two are similar in levels of suffering? Are you that dense? Even if you killed an individual instantly others in its social group suffer as a result. Not the case with ungulates, many of which travel in loose herds and have no deep social bonds to speak of other than perhaps the parent-offspring bond.

Ah! We hunt more than ungulates; I didn't ask about ungulate hunting, I asked about hunting, period.

Really now? Ever see what happens to a pack of wolves or wild dogs when a member of the pack is killed? If it's the member who initiated play the joy can go completely out of them. Certainly killing a canine can have very bad sociological effects on the pack as a whole.

Speaking of canines, here's a thought: Given that you think that hunting is bad since it causes animal suffering (forgive me if that's not your argument), and you want to prevent animal suffering, and assuming sufficient technology...

Would you consider it moral to prevent predators from hunting? I'm assuming that we'd feed them in some other way, perhaps give them vat-grown meat.

What if we let them hunt a creature that has a robot brain, but, say, the body of a brainless deer clone grown in a vat? This way there'd be no suffering whatsoever on the part of the prey, and the predators would get to exercise their natural instincts.

For that matter would it be moral to take predators into a matrix like simulation?

Note that I'm not using the tired on argument that hunting/killing is alright since it happens in nature. Rather I'm asking if hunting / killing is only bad if done by a moral agent (e.g. humans in our case) or if it is in itself a bad thing. No really think about that one.

Urm no that's not a circular argument... perhaps you should look up Circular Argument in the dictionary or something. The argument goes something like this: There's a boundary past which your species as a whole, or you as an individual act of nature/science, deserve consideration as a fully sapient being. So far the only species we know of that crosses this boundary is the human race.

Except the pesky little fact that the boundary is completely arbitrary and gets defined in such a way as to exclude a priori every other species. It is circular because you are saying "Humans are the only beings worthy of direct moral consideration because moral consideration is given only to beings which possess characteristics which I have defined as being exclusive to humans"

A casebook circular argument. Dont try to bullshit me.

Urm no, it's not a circular argument, it's a straight forward logical argument, it's that you don't like the implications of it.

That quality is, among other things, the ability to use secondary tools (e.g. tools to make other tools. Rather than primary tools such as certain apes use).

And why is THAT your criteria? Because you say so?

Ah! Now we're getting somewhere!

You are of course free to disagree with any definition I set, you're free to say that you don't think that the boundary should be where I put it. However any boundary that you offer is going to be equally arbitrary

However you obviously agree that some animals can be morally killed, even though they display a lot of the qualities you've mentioned earlier. So obviously you, yourself, would have to agree that there is a limit, a boundary.

Your boundary is set in a different place, based on different criteria, however people living in glass houses; any boundary you'd pick is going to be fairly arbitrary.

For our argument we will consider only cullings in by legitimate authorities.

Seeing as there is seldom a real reason to cull elephant herds...

Oh really? So you don't view the cases where elephant herds have outgrown the confines of their preserves to be a real reason? Or what about cases where they flock has outgrown the available food supply of their area?

If I were to use purely secular reasoning I'd find it impossible to create an intellectually acceptable argument against animal cruelty.

That just means you need to do more reading

You mean Bentham? Singer? People like that? I'm sorry but I don't hold to utilitarianism.

I also think that we're going in circles, our arguments and viewpoints are simply too far apart for there to be any real argument. Between that and the fact that I have a pesky real life I'll have to make this my last post. I haven't been posting on SD or SB either for weeks, simply got no time.

P.S. To Sharkbait: I live in a country where I can get elk, reindeer, and whale meat at the local supermarket. Make of it what you will.