The whale has become Britain’s sacred cow

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[/audioplayer]Imagine if a bunch of Bollywood celebrities turned up in Britain to protest outside steak houses, lie down in front of abattoir trucks as they tried to leave beef farms and started describing Britain as ‘barbaric’ for killing cattle.

You have just got an idea of what it must be like to be a Faroe Islander trying to go about your business harvesting whales from the Atlantic. As has become clear over the spate of stranding at Skegness and Hunstanton, whales have become our sacred species, as Simon Barnes points out in an article in the latest issue of The Spectator.

We weep over them, engage in the pointless – and probably cruel – business of trying to refloat them, even though their internal organs have already been crushed under their own weight. And if we can’t blame Faroe Islanders for a whale’s death, we blame anything else human: sonar from ships, plastic bags, submarines – anything which helps to maintain the narrative that cruel and unkind humans have caused the death of these noble and beautiful creatures.

Pollution, of course, is something we should care about – the quantity of plastic waste which has found its way into the oceans, and into the stomachs of sea creatures, is a disgrace. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that the deaths of the whales washed up on beaches either side of the North Sea over the past few weeks have no man-made cause. The whales’ stomachs have been found to contain not plastic but a species of squid found off Norway. They came south, it seems, not because they were following some alluring sonar but because they were chasing the squid. Once they reached Dogger Bank it was the shallow waters, not any man-made underwater sound, which interfered with their navigation skills. Thereafter, they were doomed.

For all the efforts of environmentalists to blame sonar for whale strandings, no-one has produced any convincing evidence that it is to blame. Moreover, mass-strandings have been occurring since at least the time of Aristotle, who described such an event. As to why strandings should be occurring now, one suggestion has been that it is a result of whale populations regenerating after commercial whaling all but ceased. The more whales there are, the more population pressure and the more likely it is that pods will end up swimming fatally into shallow waters.

A rational response would be to ask: have we reached the point at which it would be better for whale welfare if we allowed controlled numbers of certain species to be culled? Whaling should rightly be stopped where a species is under threat, but where numbers are rising, whaling ought to be as much part of conservation as culling deer or rabbits.

Trouble is rational thought goes out of the window where the British and whales are concerned. We are ruled instead by romance and mawkishness. I wonder if whales would get half the press they do if they didn’t give the superficial appearance of seeming to smile. We cannot know what the whales think of it all when, suffocating on a beach and already mortally injured, they are approached by teams of humans trying to shove them back into the waters whence they came. But it would seem to me to be better for their welfare had they been hunted well before they reached a Norfolk beach.