What was truly objectionable about Australia's whaling industry was the waste. Thumping great mammals were boiled down for oil and some other products, but tonnes of meat went to no or little purpose. Tonnes of tasty, nutritious, good-for-you meat. The number of whales towed into various whale-butchering bays around Australia between 1790 and 1978 would be hard to believe. One figure will give you a sense of the waste - between 1950 and 1962, just 12 years, 12,500 humpback whales were processed on the east coast!
Since Australia stopped whaling in 1978, much more recently than people realise, we have become aware of the passion of the Japanese for whale meat, and at the same time our tastes in food have become much more international.
I believe Colin the baby humpback has come along at the right time. Let's eat him, which will put him out of his motherless misery and put us in tune with the Japanese at the same time.
Eat him! Eat one of the whales that fill us with awe as they travel up and down our coast! We admire cows and we eat cows, and there's no reason why we can't admire their mammalian cousins, whales, and eat whales. We love many things in life and in death. At the very least we'll be able to berate Japan from a position of some knowledge rather than as a nation that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of whales without eating one of them!
Tell me, is there a moral difference between eating a whale and eating a cow?
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