Japanese Dolphin Harvest and Polar Bear Conservation Ethics

Introduction: Cultural Values and Animal Ethics

Environmental ethics often requires us to confront the tension between deeply held cultural traditions and evolving moral standards regarding the treatment of animals. Two issues — Japan's dolphin harvest and the accelerating decline of the polar bear — illustrate how difficult it can be to apply consistent ethical principles across cultural boundaries and in the face of large-scale environmental change.

The Japanese Dolphin Harvest

In Japan, dolphin and whale meat have been traditional foods for many centuries. In Western culture, dolphins and whales have come to be regarded with much greater respect and moral consideration, largely because of the complexity of their family structures, their sophisticated communications, and their capacity for interspecies social relationships and bonding with human beings. In that light, many Westerners view Japan's dolphin hunting as a serious moral atrocity — the brutal trapping and slaughter of terrorized, intelligent, and sentient creatures with little regard for their suffering.

According to one account of a typical hunt:

"In a typical hunt the fishermen pursue pods of dolphins across open seas, banging metal poles together beneath the water to confuse their hypersensitive sonar. The exhausted animals are driven into a large cove sealed off by nets to stop them escaping and dragged backwards into secluded inlets the following morning to be butchered with knives and spears."

Dolphin drive hunting, as practiced in places such as Taiji, Japan, has attracted sustained international criticism from animal welfare organizations and Western governments alike.

Cultural Relativism and the Ethics of the Hunt

However, as brutal as the spectacle appears to outside observers, the Japanese regard their dolphin hunting much as North Americans have traditionally raised cattle for slaughter and hunted game for both food and sport. North Americans also hunted bison to near-extinction, hunted whale well into the twentieth century, and still fish for tuna and other game fish. The fact that Westerners reserve greater sympathy for certain species seems unfair — even a form of cultural bias — to the Japanese, whose way of life has long depended on dolphin fishing:

"I think we are the victims of a form of racism… Westerners slaughter cattle and other animals in the most inhumane ways imaginable, but no one says a word. Why is it that only Japan gets this kind of treatment?"

Ultimately, it is difficult to impose Western moral values about the treatment of animals except through geopolitical pressure and diplomatic persuasion. At the same time, the situation invites a lesson in perspective: pigs, for instance, are widely regarded as more intelligent than dogs and are no less capable of forming bonds with human beings when befriended rather than raised for slaughter. The cultural relativism at the heart of this debate challenges us to examine the consistency of our own moral standards before condemning others.

The Plight of the Polar Bear

According to environmental experts such as Kassie Siegel of the Centre for Biological Diversity, based in California, the natural habitat of the polar bear is disappearing too rapidly to sustain the species in the wild for much longer. Global climate change has caused so much Arctic ice to melt that polar bears are increasingly unable to pursue enough food to maintain a healthy body weight, reproduce successfully, or nourish their cubs to adulthood.

Unfortunately, there may be little that can be done for the polar bear beyond preserving the species in captivity unless there is a dramatic advance in technologies capable of reversing climate change. Andrew Derocher, head of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Polar Bear Specialist Group, has stated:

"There is no easy conservation fix… Without stabilizing the climate by taking serious and urgent action on climate change, I don't see a future for polar bears at all."

Conclusion

Ultimately, it is ironic that the same urgent efforts necessary to save the polar bear may also be necessary to save the entire biosphere for the benefit of human society as well. Both case studies — the Japanese dolphin harvest and the polar bear's decline — underscore a central truth of environmental ethics: moral questions about animals and ecosystems cannot be resolved without grappling honestly with cultural bias, historical responsibility, and the global consequences of human behavior.