Murder Most Aquatic: "A Massive Massacre"
Corpses lined the streets of Berlin yesterday. Beside the Brandenburg Gate, the city’s premier tourist-destination, 17 dead bodies were laid out in a trough of ice. Visitors to the German capital may or may not have been shocked to inspect the cadavers, each a victim of the same ruthlessly indiscriminate killer — their distant, land-based, mammalian cousin — the mad animal called man.
“300,000 dolphins and whales are dying in our oceans every year. That’s one animal every two minutes,” Greenpeace marine biologist Dr. Thomas Henningsen told dropping knowledge. “The fishery system is so destructive that we have a massive massacre going on in all of our oceans.”
Washed up on the shores of Europe and collected by activists, the 17 carcasses paraded by Greenpeace yesterday were each representative of a different species of dolphin or whale. Entangled and suffocated in fishing-nets, poisoned by toxic pollution, gored by propellors and disoriented by sonar, yesterday’s forlorn and macabre display was equivalent to the number of cetaceans killed by human activity around every half an hour. “We need a policy which is banning fisheries that are causing this kind of bycatch,” Henningsen insists. “We need to create a network of protected areas for these animals and all our oceans. We need the International Whaling Commission to take responsibility.”
Protesting in Germany on the eve of the G8 summit, Greenpeace’s campaign is characteristically well-timed. After all, today, in the UN’s designations, is the International Day for Biological Diversity in the Year of the Dolphin in the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development. Moreover, next week, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) will bring together representatives of more than 70 countries in Anchorage, Alaska, where whaling nations such as Japan, Norway and Iceland will lobby to extend their catch quotas (perhaps under the dubious pretext of so-called “scientific whaling”). Quoting marine biologist Stefanie Werner, Greenpeace’s press release titled “A Dying Breed?” calls on governments attending the IWC “to make a commitment to defend the whales, not the whaling industry”:
“A clear signal needs to be sent that oceans protection is being taken seriously and governments can start at the IWC by defending the moratorium on commercial whaling and making a real commitment to modernizing the Commission.”
In these days of the sixth greatest mass exinction of species in history, dolphins and whales are perhaps the most tragic victims of human-induced climate change and ecological devastation, because they are the most intelligent of all our fellow creatures. In terms of the most reliable scientific measure of animal intellect — the brain to body-size ratio known as the ‘encephalisation quotient’ (EQ) — bottlenose dolphins register 5.6 (compared to 2.5 for our closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees) and are surpassed only by us humans, whose brains weigh in at 7.4. Recent research into dolphins’ behavioral intelligence has revealed sophisticated collective intelligence in their hunting-strategies and play, as well as astonishing levels of individual self-awareness. Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian in 2003, zoologist Anuschka de Rohan reported on an experiment whereby…
“Researchers installed mirrors inside New York Aquarium to test whether two bottlenose dolphins were self-aware enough to recognise their reflections. They placed markings in non-toxic black ink on various places of the dolphins' bodies. The dolphins swam to the mirror and exposed the black mark to check it out. They spent more time in front of the mirror after being marked than when they were not marked. The ability to recognise themselves in the mirror suggests self-awareness, a quality previously only seen in people and great apes.”
Dolphins are so clever, de Rohan contends, that they’ve even shown a fondness for watching TV.
While we’re passed the stage of hunting sperm whales almost to extinction so that their brain oil could light the lamps of the industrialized west, our priorities today as regards our companions in the biosphere are seemingly no less twisted. In perhaps the most brazen perversion of interspecies relations, the US Navy has been forcibly recruiting dolphins, among other aquatic species, since the Cold War. Strapped into special harnesses, implanted with electrodes under their skin, "US Navy Marine Mammals" patrol ports, protect warships and nuclear submarines, scout for mines and have reportedly even run attack-and-kill missions equipped with poison dart-guns. It’s doubly ironic then that while cetaceans clearly have the smarts to serve human beings in sophisticated capacities, their special status as the most intelligent of ocean-dwellers has still yet to be acknowledged and protected. According to Greenpeace:
“Scientists worldwide have highlighted strong links between the resilience of marine ecosystems and their species richness. Whales are an important component of this desperately needed biodiversity… Many species have still not recovered from the devastation of commercial whaling and population levels for some species, including minke whales in Antarctica, are unknown, making it clear that there is no place for whaling in the 21st century.”
If, as the renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado suggested to dropping knowledge, human beings could truly see themselves as a part of nature, might they not then treat other intelligent life on this planet with something akin to civility? Perhaps, the officials of the International Commission on Whaling would do well to ask themselves such a question — or this one, donated to dropping knowledge by Edgar:
Ask yourself…
