Eat a whale and save the planet is what a Norwegian Pro-whaling lobby is saying. This new idea came about because of a study showing that harpooning the whales is less damaging to the climate than farming livestock.

Now there is no arguing with the fact that cows produce A LOT of carbon emissions. Right now one of the biggest problems with cows, is the fact, that they Burp and Fart and release so much methane into the atmosphere. Another issue with cows is that they laterally mow down a country side, or the farmers do to feed them, and this process removes any chances of the worlds natural sponges to survive to soak up carbons. It is true that a boat going out in the water to hunt whales does use less carbons kill a whale, but there is more to this then just a studies finding. Luckily no government officials have followed in this thinking, it would be another big mistake made by not looking at all the facts. Good exampe of this - See the article about Bio-fuels and how people forgot to take in consideration the land use and how it releases more carbons to Clear Land, Grow, Crop it, and then ship the Corn ethanol, then it does to use fossil fuel. Which means we need to look into other sources for energy and not jump the gun and listen to the first study that comes along.

I can see how this group came to this idea, but there is more to it then just saying, "Lets go and kill the whales, and prevent green house gas!!". This idea is just stupid in its own right.

First Off Lets Examine Cows

They are perfectly happy roaming around a grassy range and eating their life away. They provide milk, although hormone laced 90% of the time, and beef  to millions (billions?) of people around the world. Humans have been raising cows for so long we have mastered several techniques for raising them and to many people it’s an art form and a science. So the knowledge of what they do and how they do it, is nothing new.

The bad side of cows -  As I said earlier cows release massive amounts of methane gases into the atmospheres, they also clear several types of grass lands, scrubs, etc, thus getting rid of the natural sponges of the world. The grain mixture that cows usually feed on is just more carbons being added to the atmosphere by tractors, trailers, and trucks to get the feed to them. So as a result the overall care and feeding of a cow adds a lot of carbon / methane.

Now Lets Examine Whales

Whales roam the oceans of the world, unlike cows that roam only a grassy landscape, if the cow is lucky. Whales eat massive amounts of plankton(krill) and various other organisms that are in the water that would most likely go out of balance if nothing was there to eat it. We have seen this with other animals when the predator leaves or is killed off, the other niches go out of whack and things get really messed up, a good example is wolves in Yellow Stone National Park. Whales that hunt for prey, such as the hump back whales, feed on specific predators usually the largest predators in the water are food for hump back whales, such as Giant Squids. Now if nothing was there to take on the giant squids and feed off of them, it makes you wonder what would happen. Sperm whales also eat jellyfish along with sea turtles, and if I am not mistaken, places that have killed many of the whales around them, such as Japan, are suffering from a massive invasion of Jellyfish, and nothing is eating them. Couldn’t be because they got rid of all the predators that eat these. Granted there is also massive changes in the water itself that is causing the release of jellyfish, but this issue is compounded by the fact nothing is there to feed off of them.

Whales are very hard to study and our over all knowledge of them is limited. Unlike cows where we have been studying them for centuries, where we know what they do, why they do what they do, for whales this is not true. For us to immediately say it’s good to kill them is stupid, because we really have no idea what they add, or take away from, the overall picture of the world. For all we know, we would go out and kill them and then find they did something that we never even knew of, or thought of, and it would have massive side effects to the human race.

In conclusion the study was right in saying it takes less carbons to kill and eat whales then cows, but much like other studies, they have neglected to include the other side of the story. Right now they should just leave whales alone and find a less polluting way to raise and care for cows, and fund the research to limit the methane that cows put into the atmosphere. The quick fix is not to kill whales, but to solve the current issues with the knowledge we already have.

 

Read the article from Reuters

 

 

 

 

Share This Digg This [?]

You Should Also Check Out This Post:

More Active Posts: