I have just finished reading Moby Dick written by Herman Melville in 1851, in preparation for my Uni exams. After persevering through endless chapters of numbingly minute nautical detail and obscure political symbolism, I eventually found one chapter that particularly stood out to me, I’m sure you will see why, it is entitled 105- Will He Perish?
In this chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, argues in the defence of his profession of whaling, claiming there is no valid argument supporting any possible extinction of whales. His argument proceeds thus:
“at one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants: that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle…there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East – if they still survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting…”
Oh, how wrong you were Melville! The continued practice of commercial whaling has had a devastating impact on the world’s whale populations, pushing some like the North Atlantic Right Whale, for example, to the brink of extinction – it is estimated there are around 350 of these leviathans surviving. Likewise, the irony (which we are afforded through the vantage point of hindsight) in Ishmael’s argument is only exemplified further when we look at the impact hunting has had on elephants. Over a 10 year period in the 1980’s, Africa’s cross-continent elephant population plummeted from approximately 1.2 million elephants, to 600,000 due to poaching. Although Melville’s attitude is outdated by around 160 years, it still perpetuates itself in the thriving ivory trade threatening elephants, and the ‘scientific’ whaling endorsed by Japan, Norway and Iceland.
It's a Wild Life... 