The Claremont Port Side and Saving the Whales

Abraham Gesner saved the whales by giving us kersone

The Claremont Port Side wants you to save the whales through increasing governmental power. (Maybe they got tired about writing about saving Darfur.)

Mr. Kyle Ragins would have you believe that

1) whaling is harming endangered species.
2) whalers employ inhumane practices.
3) whale meat is dangerous to humans.

On the second point first, aren't whalers supposed to be inhumane? They are after all whaling!

On the first point, there is widespread disagreement as to whether or not some whales are still "endangered." In the latest assessment by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), several prominent whales species have been downgraded to not endangered. One such species is the gray whale and the southern right whale.

On the final point, it may well be true that whale meat is unhealthy -- though considerable debate remains -- but let us suppose that it is unhealthy. Privatizing the whales would mean that people would take greater care to ensure that their whales weren't contaminated.

Still, one might reasonably ask whether or not the threshold for PCBs was set too low. Japan has a limit of .5 ppm for PCBs. The U.S.'s Food and Drug Administration has a 2 ppm standard. Whales fall comfortably at .072 at their highest levels! As a reasonable person would know, it all depends just how much whale you eat. Still, it seems odd that anti-whaling activists make such a big deal over a limit of .72 when people in the U.S. routinely eat over that limit for swordfish.

Naturally, Mr. Ragins wants the U.S. to use its soft power to mau mau the Japanese into no longer whaling. Why that is in the interest of the U.S. is anyone's guess. Last I checked whales do not vote. (ACORN has had trouble registering them. They tend to be migratory and fickle voters. Given that their songs can broadcast for miles, they believe in free speech and would likely vote Republican and against the so-called Fairness Doctrine.)

But if one were so inclined to save the remaining whales, the smart thing to do would be to issue property rights. Save the whales? No, privatize and then farm them!

It isn't so far fetched an idea when it's properly considered. After all, capitalism and property rights saved the whales before. Abraham Gesner devised a method to distill kerosene from petroleum, guaranteeing that the whale for oil market would be vastly too costly to continue in its mass scale.

There is a reason that cows are not facing extinction and from what I'm told, cow and whale taste much the same when filleted. (The latter is a bit more fishy.)

Fortunately, this issue seems to be just one more that technology can help address, if only government got out of the way. It seems to have worked with elephants and ivory, in any event. It also worked with tiger farms.

In 1997, The Asian Wall Street Journal believed it was possible. If anything, the technology has probably gotten better. They wrote then,

Privatizing whales may seem farfetched, but in fact the technological obstacles to an ownership program are rapidly disappearing. Back in the heyday of whaling, it was simply not feasible to exert ownership over living whales, but the whalers did construct an elaborate set of rules that governed harpooned whales. Readers of "Moby Dick" will be reminded of clearly marked harpoons that carried different rights of proprietorship over a whale depending on the speed of the current and the type of whale. In 1993, scientists tracked a single blue whale for 43 days over 3,200 kilometers (1,984 miles) based solely on its individual song. Other advanced technologies such as satellites and unmanned submersibles could be even more effective if given the chance.

We could even use the information we learn about the whales to farm them.
Of course the Greenpeace nuts won't let us farm the whales. They'd prefer to have them live in the wild and therefore go extinct.