What's so great about dolphins???

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Do you eat apes? Would you raise, slaughter, and then eat a chimpanzee? Note a chimp evinces about the intelligence of a three year old.

Dolphins play with forethought (say, blowing bubbles in a way that they combine so the dolphin can swim through them and burst a big bubble). They recognize themselves in mirrors. Though we have hardly begun to crack the code, they communicate with each other through sound. They are curious and play with humans, and have even saved drowning people. They form alliances. They have assisted other species in giving birth. They learn from each other through observation. Their brains have anatomical features that are correlated with higher intelligence.

It's obviously too early to reach any firm conclusions, but it seems reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt and treat them like an intelligent species rather than a protein source.

Personally, I'm not sweating somebody eating a river dolphin with a 7oz brain. But a bottlenose exhibiting very complex behaviors coupled with the convoluted folds that a human brain has? I think there are more reasonable sources of protein than this.

This.

On planet Earth, there is a certain amount of protection given to people. It is socially acceptable to do things to animals it is not okay to do to people. Is this fair? it's not for me to say...but at this point, in this day in age, we've made a sort of deal as a species that to some capacity or another we're going to have a set of rules that says you can't just do whatever you want to people the way you can to non people. That's why we have Holocaust museums and not Cow Holocaust Museums memorializing slaughter house cows. It's why most of the world's governments condemn the prison nation of North Korea but not factory farms.

so in any event, we decided to draw the line. And of course there's the point that it just make sense for a species to want to create a set of rules that protects their population, but there's more to it than that. people don't fight for human rights for the survival of the species. They do it because they can empathize with the suffering of other humans. we share a bond with other humans because of our similarities...our base intelligence, our emotions, our behaviors. I feel we want to protect humans because they are like us. Now granted with human to human empathy, you could say that's still just part of a species survival instinct...but for me, when I look at a chimp or a dolphin, and how like us they are, I feel a great amount of empathy for them even though it's not the same as with a human being. But it's different than the way I feel for an animal very unlike me, like a sheep.

i feel empathy for dolphins I think because, like humans, they are like me. (now granted i'm a vegetarian, but i am not against humanely raised meat animals. But i do have MORE empathy and want MORE protection to dolphins and certain other animals) Certain animals stand above the rest in their similarities to humans in the way they learn, behave, think, etc. dolphins, whales, elephants, primates. I think many humans who study them, or have interacted with them, are just amazed at how like us they are. I feel that they are enough like us that they deserve the same special protection that we offer to humans in that you can't just kill them for food or sport....that they are enough like us that, as stated above, we just have more appropriate forms of protein.

 

[23_Tauri]

The reason we don't farm carnivores is that it's inefficient; you'd have to raise animals as food for the carnivore, which would effectively mean you'd need ten times more fodder to raise a bear than a pig of the same size.

(Yes, I know that would be one monster of a pig.)

Of course, silly me, it's quite obvious now I think about it. Thanks Mirrorglass and Corn Sail.

 

[Nursedan]

Well, I finally got around to seeing "The Cove" as I mentioned in the OP. Not a great movie. Kinda boring, actually. Mostly it's the preparation involved in illegally filming and taping the roundup of dolphins in a small town in Japan. The meat is apparently very high in mercury, and for this reason (and the taboo of eating dolphin) it's presumably sold as whale meat to unknowing Japanese consumers. As a whole, the Japanese seem to frown upon the killing of dolphins, and certainly the consuming of them, so it's only this small town that has adopted this tradition as it's own.

After seeing this movie, I understand only slightly more about why the killing of dolphins is different than other hunting or fishing. The movie relies heavily on emotional appeals from people who have had personal experience with dolphins, including the original trapper and trainer for "Flipper", who spent 10 years building the industry up, and "the last 35 years takngit down" often getting arrested in the process. The reason the Japanese give for this kill, amongst some others, is that the dolphins are "pests", which eat up the fish that the people could otherwise eat. The Japanese come across as quite primitive on their tradition, although the rest of the world uses dolphins that aren't killed during this roundup in dolphin shows all the time.


The actual kill is a small part of the movie.

 

[Jekyll's Guest]

Well, they're delicious...

You can also train them to swim over to you in a pool, carrying a plate of delicious snacks made from their friends. Mmmmmmm.

 

[Mark6]

(now granted i'm a vegetarian, but i am not against humanely raised meat animals.

This is off-topic, but I am curious -- how do you feel about hunting for food? Keep in mind that unlike a domestic animal, humanely raised or not, wild animals are aware of the danger and have means to escape (and in some cases, to fight back).

They also generally taste better (horrid taste of venison notwithstanding)