I’ve been thinking a lot about this.

My Twitter feed, heavy on animal lovers, keeps me up to date on all the outrages in the world about animal abuse. It has been very hard to miss the aggressive tones in some of the tweets about the dolphin hunting in Taiji, Japan.

Some people were quick to make this about the race and the nationality. I am Japanese and I don’t particularly enjoy the insinuation that the whole country is filled with “savages”. I laugh when I see statements like “Asian people don’t give a shit about cute animals”. Some even brought up Unit 731 to make a point that the Japanese were never humane people, ever. Not very intelligent-sounding. Then, there are people on the other side of the extreme. They defend the practice saying “White people, stop telling Asian people what to eat.” “Denmark kill dolphins too!” and those also sound really dumb.

Even if I ignore those “all-emotion no-logic” assertions, though, it is still hard to ignore the controversy. Why are those fishermen doing this anyway, I kept wondering to myself. We rarely (if ever) saw whale meat (dolphins = small whales) while growing up. They practically disappeared from supermarkets when I was little. Why are they still hunting whales then? Who is paying them for the animals? Why are they so adamant about this practice? Is it really that essential to their livelihood?

I needed to do a quick mind-mapping to organize the random and scattered information I was getting. I also wanted to organize the issues and various stances that I see out there.

What are the arguments for killing/capturing/hunting dolphins? What are the ones against? How about how we treat them while they are alive? And you know, those annoying ‘what-aboutery‘ arguments that seem so easy for people to resort to?

So, here it is. Doing this exercise really helps me grasp the landscape of the outrage. Next time, I will organize the various suggestions that people have made for the issue.

Dolphin Hunting in Taiji

Having clarified where people are coming from, here are my stance on some items in the map above.

What-aboutery is lame. While it is important to remember that there are similar issues elsewhere in the world, that does not reduce or increase the magnitude of the situation in Taiji. Suggesting to be fair and discuss the other issues also is, to me, just an attempt to deflect the outrage, and to derail the people who really want to find a compromise and/or solution. So, I think those ludicrous arguments are not worth paying attention to.

Tradition/Culture defense is invalid.  Just because something has been going on for years, or been part of people’s lives for a long time, it does not mean at all that it should continue. I’m not sure why people even attempt to use this type of arguments. If we are talking about the difficulties of changing the custom, sure. The tradition/culture arguments make very valid points. But if we are discussing if a practice should be preserved or not, that argument is completely invalid.

Abuse ≠ Killing. How we treat animals while they are alive is, to me, a completely separate issue from whether we should kill them for our consumption. Intelligence level of the animals matters only when we discuss how they should be treated while they are alive and aware. To be honest, I don’t know how we should decide which animals should be consumed and which should not be. It’s either vegetarianism or treating all animals equally.