Plain Talk
about matters of interest in Washington State and, often, elsewhereOctober 2007
Measuring the intelligence of non-human species is, to put it mildly, not a well-defined process. But sapience, which is not quite the same thing, is perhaps more easily determined. "Sapience" means, roughly, "consciousness"--an awareness of world and self, an ability to experience pain, physical and emotional. Few, whether laymen or expert scientists, would deny that all "higher" animals--say, at least all mammals--are sapient.
Of all the non-human species on Earth, the ones generally classed as the most intelligent are not the anthropoids, but rather the cetaceans, notably porpoises and--most especially--whales. While expert opinions vary, some even holding that whales may be, in many senses, smarter than humans, no one, absolutely no one, denies that whales are certainly at or near the top of non-human species for sapience.
So if it would bother you to see, say, a dog being tortured, consider how much greater a wrong it is to torture a creature like a whale. And if you think all this is leading up to the Makah whale hunt, you are dead right.
In the wildly unlikely case that you haven't heard about this almost indescribable horror, here's a recap:
Not long ago, five members of Washington State's Makah tribe, ignoring international convention, U.S. law, and their own Tribal Council, hustled out to sea to kill them a whale. Finally finding one with their high-powered motorboat, they proceeded to stab it with nine long stainless-steel harpoons, then shoot it almost two dozen times with a gun described as "without a doubt, the most powerful weapon you can buy"--one whose slugs, even at up to 1.5 miles, arrive with more wham than one at point-blank range from Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum.
Well, not surprisingly, the whale finally died. But so skilled were these self-styled "expert hunters" that, even with all that armament (the lot no doubt fully "traditional"), they did so lousy a job that the wretched beast took over 12 profoundly agonized hours to finally expire. (The leader of the gang afterwards said he was "feeling kind of proud" of his "accomplishments".)
The Makah Tribal Council then made appropriate noises disowning these five "irresponsible persons" (a phrasing that is appalling in itself). But, underneath the hypocrisy, the real objection that the Council had to this slaughter is that it was bad public relations, a setback to the Makah's urgent pursuit of permission to murder more whales, only "legally".
The Makah claim certain unique treaty rights, the legalities of which are tedious, complicated, and above all irrelevant to the core issues. Their need, they claim, is twofold: first, practical, to "stock the freezer" in a poverty-stricken area; second, cultural, to bolster their cultural heritage. Both claims are fertilizer.
The whales the Makah are intent on murdering are grey whales. The meat of the grey whale is just barely edible, and was never consumed anywhere in the world save in dire emergencies; the common Japanese word for grey-whale meat is unprintable in a family newspaper. And, in fact, most of the meat from the last legal whale murder, in 1999, was just thrown away. "Stock the freezer", my elbow.
The "cultural" argument is even more intelligence-insulting. To begin with, whaling is not a "living tradition" with the Makah; the last Makah whale hunt before 1999 was over 80 years ago--no Makah alive today remembers when whaling was a going thing. Moreover, even when it was, it was just a commercial operation--a business, not a ceremony.
But trumping even that is the blindingly obvious point that because something was once done by some culture does not make it appropriate or even acceptable today: imagine the Aztecs agitating for rights to cut the hearts out of living sacrifices, or the Maori to pursue cannibalism, or the Thugs to resume ritual strangling of strangers. "Cultural tradition" is not some automatic free pass to any sort of conduct whatever, though all together too many politicians and journalists run in terror when the phrase is invoked, lest they be accused of being "culturally insensitive".
So what's really going on here?
The answer--as ever--is simple: Follow The Money. And the money trail that ends in Washington State starts in Japan.
Most of the civilized world strongly opposes whaling. But a very few countries, notably the Japanese, aggressively pursue it. Why? Whale-meat consumption in Japan long ago dropped to abysmally low levels; most of that which continues does so because the government aggressively flogs it (as by putting whale meat in school lunches). The flogging continues because the megacorporations that do whaling make a substantial profit off it, their glove-on-hand friends in government assuring them of a market, actual public tastes notwithstanding.
But the yen-boys are not happy: the world doesn't like the idea of slaughtering creatures considered by many experts to be as intelligent as humans. So the yen-boys take steps--and here's where the money trail starts: Japan "donates" some "aid grants" to a few big world powers--Palau (5.4 million dollars), St. Kitts and Nevis (4.8 million dollars), and Nicaragua (11.2 million dollars); by strange coincidence, those three mighty nations each have a seat on the bizarrely constituted International Whaling Commission, and by equally strange coincidence, all voted with Japan to allow it a free pass to kill over a thousand whales a year as "scientific research". But even a thousand killings a year isn't profitable enough; the yen-boys need some other kind of free pass, one with fewer or no limits.
Now we're getting there. As Mr. Tadaio Makamura of the Japanese Whaling Commission, addressing the International Whaling Commission, summed it up--neatly, cleanly, and with refreshing candor--"What is the difference between cultural necessity for the Makah and cultural necessity for the Japanese?" What indeed. The Japanese know full well that if they tried to assert "cultural necessity" on their own, they'd be laughed out of the room. So they seek out an impoverished native tribe willing to be cat's paws for the promise of some surreptitious cash. Then, when the Makah get their permissions, Mr. Makamura steps back in. The Money Trail is complete.
During a conversation that occurred during the annual International Whaling Commission meeting of 1996 in Monaco--on Oct. 22, 1996, at the Stella Polaris Cafe, to be exact--Nakamura reportedly told one group that he had visited Neah Bay and met with tribal officials; the purpose of his visit, he said, was to convince the Makah that there were financial incentives to exercising their treaty whaling rights. But Nakamura went on to say that in fact the Japanese had little interest in purchasing the meat, saying "Gray whale meat does not taste very good." When asked why the Japanese would lure the Makah with empty promises, Nakamura allegedly replied, "Don't you see? Once they win the right to kill whales in the U.S. for cultural reasons, the IWC will be obliged to recognize Japanese whaling as cultural also."
It's not that the Makah are ignorant of exactly what's going on. Some of their own Tribal Elders vigorously oppose it. (It helps an outsider to understand that the Makah Tribal Council is a governing body, a political entity, whereas the tribe's spiritual guidance comes--or is supposed to come--from its tribal elders, "Tribal Elder" being a term with an exact meaning.)
All that remains is the desire to kill. Not for subsistance, we do not need the whale meat to survive. The great difference is that where before we killed whales for the Makah, now some want to kill whales for the Japanese. We have become pawns in the global struggle to resume commercial whaling operations by countries like Norway and Japan. Our culture will be the mask behind which the Japanese and Norwegian whalers will profit. --S'tassawood of the Cheaba family of the Makah nation, 73-year-old Makah Elder
The Tribal Council should heed its Tribal Elders--but it doesn't, such is the power of the proverbial "almighty dollar" (or, in this case, the almightier yen).
As S'tassawood knows, this ghastly business is very, very certainly not about anyone's "cultural heritage", but rather about someone making an awful lot of money in sneaky ways. As I said, nowadays public figures run screaming from "cultural" issues. But this thing stinks worse than a dead whale. There are better ways to make money than prostitution.
Late postscript: As of 9 November 2007, the defense attorneys for the charming lads who are so proud of their accomplishments are seeking to postpone a federal trial at least until March so they have "more time to prepare their case"; mind, it's already over a year since the horrid event itself, which a naif might think was enough time to prepare a defense for a war, much less a one-day affair the facts of which are scarcely in dispute (it's all a matter of law, not fact). And, as a Seattle Times article continues, "despite Makah leaders' earlier vows of swift tribal justice for the men, a trial in tribal court has been slowed because the tribal prosecutor has family and business ties to two of the accused." Interesting interpretation of swift justice. And in the end, the charming lads involved will doubtless cop a plea to some lesser charge: it's the way of the world.
Another late postscript: Japan has sent out its whaling fleet with instructions to take a thousand whales for "scientific research"--this time around, including humpback whales, a type hunted to near extinction four decades ago. As the BBC reports, "Environmentalists say Japan's research programme is a pretext for keeping [its] whaling industry alive." Oh, say not so.
Plain Talk is a more or less monthly feature carried in the weekly Ritzville Adams County Journal.
The text appearing above is a substantially expanded version of the published feature, which is limited by word count.