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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Apart from the ... hunting and the killing.
Why even hunt whales in the first place? Sure, it's one big food source when you snag one, but people who have tried whale say it's bland and uninteresting. It's just a bunch of fat. And it takes a lot of effort to kill it, haul it, parse it out, etc.
Fish farms give you much more good quality meat without all of the species endangerment.
Tradition, one of the worst reasons on earth to do anything.
There are certain very small remote communities in the far north that are isolated and hard to reach. Whale and seal hunting provides a guaranteed food source for these small communities so that they don't have to depend on incredibly expensive (both resource and moneywise) imports. The Faroe Islands is not one of those places because obviously a cruise ship can easily get to it.
I have been to Iceland and Greenland and Alaska and Norway, etc. I promise you there is no utilitarian need to hunt whales in any of these places. They all have grocery stores where you can buy pineapples for reasonable prices.
We can argue tradition, but there is no utility here.
I mean, do they?
like not every place has a grocery store that's easy to get to
I have lived in two of those places for years and I can tell you that you have no idea what you're talking about.
For example, Fairbanks is only one third of the way up Alaska. There's still so much left north of it.
It's definitely not just fatty and bland. I've had it on Svalbard, where there's no farming or husbandry going on because it's too far up north.
Whale tastes a lot like beef, so yeah, might as well have that instead.
Exactly. Plus the article itself talks about the mercury poisoning risks associated with eating whales and dolphins.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/ambergris
If people knew how fucking easy it was to create different perfume/cologne scents and the markup for each scent, there would be riots in the streets. They can't even be regulated to put their ingredients on their bottles, because it would reveal the secret.
You don't need "rare whale vomit" to make a goddamn perfume.
natural ambergris is foraged from coastlines, not harvested from whales.
We just line them up against the wall and shoot them in the blowhole. It's the most humane way, really. /s
Yes, this whale has been killed in a perfectly harmless way