This is just a beautiful idea and a great article. Congratulations to Emma Tom for writing it. Having been eyeball to eyball with humpback whales in Hervey Bay, especially one that surfaced within touching distance and had a good look at me in my 19 foot boat, I cannot entertain the thought of these beautiful gentle creatures being hunted down and slaughtered. However, I don’t harbour the same reservations about the Japanese scientists.
The modest proposal is that knowledge-hungry Australian scientists would be able to hunt and kill several hundred Japanese whale scientists per year to obtain important information such as how old they are, where they live and how their loins taste when marinated, barbecued and served with a feisty shiraz.
It will be a controversial move, but killing Japanese pro-whalers and dissecting them into tasty bite-sized pieces is the only way to help solve enduring mysteries about this enigmatic species. Such as how they think it’s possible to nourish a local custom by eating its core ingredient into extinction. Or why they continue ignoring academic research questioning the notion that whaling has deep cultural roots in Japan in the first place.