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UK music festival The Great Escape has withdrawn its partnership with the Faroe Islands after it was criticised for working with a country which allows “barbaric” whaling
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- Title
- Brighton: Great Escape festival drops partner over whale killings
- Word count
- 441 words
Just as a point of context, commercial fisheries accidentally kill upwards of 300,000 cetaceans a year. We also intentionally kill a few thousand whales a year, most of which are hunted by aboriginal people (can't speak for other countries, but in Canada, that means settlers stole their land, stole their children, then largely succeeded in destroying their culture, history, and language. So maybe it's bad optics to call "them" barbarians for hunting whales, but the Faroese are fair game).
Notably, there's commercial whaling happening in Japan, Norway, Iceland, and South Korea! I wonder how much of the music equipment in "The Great Escape" was manufactured in those countries? Boycotts sure are fun; hopefully they're standing on their morals and not just trying to save face in light of a PR disaster.
Final note: calling another culture's practices barbaric is problematic, imo. That term has been used to dehumanize and diminish groups very frequently. They could've stuck to the facts and simply stated that they stand against whaling.
The numbers are pretty high compared to those other countries, especially per capita. But yeah, practically nothing compared to commercial fishing's accidental casualties... 300,000 is truly a mindboggling statistic. Faroese only kill about 800 per year nowadays so it's less than 0.3% as commercial fishing! Crazy thing to boycot an entire country because of that.
"especially per capita" is kind of a "yeah no shit" situation when the population is as small as that of the Faroe Islands.
I’m always dismayed by the amount of attention people living traditional lifestyles get for whaling from people who are living in a manner which requires far more vertebrate death to sustain, who rarely if ever critically analyze their own relationship to the food they themselves eat.
Oftentimes I find myself wondering if it wouldn’t be more productive if instead of animal rights activists trying to galvanize public opinion against people living on the margins of society, we asked people to look inward and see if they really can’t find themselves and their neighbors in these things they are criticizing. And if they can, have them ask themselves, where are they more likely to make a meaningful difference in their own life?
The criticism of whaling doesn't have anything to do with sustainability, as far as I know. It's unacceptable to kill whales. It doesn't matter what culture you are. You're still just a human.
Yeah, it's that cetaceans are too intelligent and complex. If the same practice was applied to apes or elephants there would be the same pushback for the same reasons, regardless of conservation status.
I’ve thought about this for a long time and I’ve never been able to come up with a coherent manner in which you can base your morality on intellectual capacity such that it is not exclusionary towards human beings that have certain disabilities
Set the bar for the required moral treatment of living beings at a lower needed level of intellect. Feel bad about killing and eating pigs and the mistreatment of dogs.
I mean, yeah I’m saying that I wish everybody who is angry about faroese whaling would actually do exactly what you’re saying. And that I find it dismaying that, seemingly all of the energy that the public has towards animal rights issues is directed at an island of like 50,000 people that has basically no arable land or convenient access to industry, and not at any of the economic entities or individuals who are actually responsible for the industrialized scale slaughter of animals.
Minor nitpick here but they are part of the Danish Realm and receive a ton of funds from the state, so whaling is not necessary for their economy. I do fully agree with you though - it's like how I'm supposed to sort my trash in like 10 different piles while elsewhere in the world, there are literally rivers of trash flowing through countries. I will do my part if I have to, but truly solving the problem of pollution requires massive overhauls of entire systems, worldwide, or else it's just going to keep being a fraction of a fraction of a tiny drop in the ocean that I'm sorting my trash.
Easier to make an impact there. I also object to the killing of wolves and bears but the former especially is too often framed as an "urban vs rural" issue. There's good arguments against eating octopus, and pigs are pretty much even with dogs but good luck making a dent there as long as the industry maintains leverage on legislature. (End meat subsidies!)
Preservation of culture doesn't trump everything and whaling is low-hanging fruit.
I guess the point of my comment is I’m hoping some people might think about how the “whale” aspect of all this is kind of arbitrary though. I’m going to edit my comment to exclude the word “unsustainable” because I think it’s really distracting for my main point
It's not arbitrary, it's the most important element. If they had a history of mass deer harvesting this would be a non-issue.
It's arbitrary in the sense that the same pressure isn't exerted against palm oil harvesting despite the damage it does to higher primates. Cruise ships and microplastics and ocean acidification do way more damage to whales and dolphins. It's not just the intelligence of the whales that's a factor here.
That's fair but doesn't come across in your first comment, and amounts to little more than whataboutism. And it's not like those are unknown issues but the problems are way bigger and the opposition more powerful.
I'm not the same person that commented before, I just kind of agree with them.
The thing making this issue special isn't that whales are smart, it's that the Faroese people aren't very powerful.