Animal Rights, Human Wrongs

Abstract

At this moment workers on board the mother ship of a pirate whaling vessel are disassembling the carcass of a whale. Though officially protected by agreement of the International Whaling Commission, pirate whalers operate outside IWC regulations, and it is not too incredible to imagine them butchering a great blue whale, the largest creature ever known to have lived on the earth—larger than thirty elephants, larger even than three of the largest dinosaurs laid end to end. A good catch, this leviathan of the deep. And, increasingly, a rare one. For the great blue, like hundreds of other animal species, is endangered—may, in fact, already be beyond the point of recovery.