Don't eat sticks. They're bad for you.
The mystery as to why a beluga whale appeared off the coast of Norway wearing a harness may finally have been solved.
The tame white whale, which locals named Hvaldimir, made headlines five years ago amidst widespread speculation that it was a Russian spy.
Now an expert in the species says she believes the whale did indeed belong to the military and escaped from a naval base in the Arctic Circle.
But Dr Olga Shpak does not believe it was a spy. She believes the beluga was being trained to guard the base and fled because it was a "hooligan".
Remember when the news used to be mostly things like this? Plus horrible wars and famines in countries that, if you're being honest, you don't really care about. And don't say you do care about the horrible events of 2015 in South Tangiyaka because I already said you'd be lying if you said you did.
I mean, a secret-ish military programme to train whales to spy is pretty fucked up but it's also just absurd -- a reality is stranger than fiction, sort of thing. A secret-ish military programme to train guard whales is substantially less fucked up but not really any less absurd.
The thing with spy whales and guard whales, is that if you're a whales are people extremist, you really can't have a problem unless you also object to human spies and security guards. In the case of Hvaldimir (which is, yes, a mash up of the word whale -- in Norwegian -- and Vladimir, as in Putin), for example, the harm appears to be its inability to feed itself. If you can honestly tell me that you could be stuck in the wilderness and survive until you grow so old you die, you're an outlier. There's a labour relationship, in other words: you learn to do this job for us and we feed you. The personhood whale analysis just fails to establish a harm.
The reverse argument rather seems to pose that domestication is wrong. I'm going to be real here. Unless you can convince me yourself that you're sapient, I don't actually care. And maybe it makes me seem incredibly callous or even actively evil, even then I still probably don't care about you specifically. It is okay to treat things which are things, differently.
Am I opposed to guard whales? Yes. Why? Because their generational lag is too long. The time that it would take to get from whales to domesticated whales feels like it would produce a lot of Hvaldimir's -- stick eating idiots that die because they're not useful enough to us but almost useful enough to get away from us. And, yeah. I did just call Hvaldimir an idiot. It's a whale. A dead one. My conscience is clear.
If you have a sense of deja vu, it's because I, er, had a previous thread about the spy whale.
