On Whales & Dolphins

Paul Lloyd Warner
“Are you the only extant member left?” we sighed.
“Tell us of your leader, father, brothers.”
“My leader perished with the tide;
My family died with all the others.” [TOP]

Dr. Harry R. Little
It had taken nine explosive harpoons in a long, agonizing five hours of blood-stained sea as she fought to the last. To us, she fought in silence, for we had not evolved enough to know, and a whale has no vocal cords. But we realize that, through her torture from torn entrails, she sent out final messages through the sea that cradled her in her suffering. Messages to all other life far beyond the limits of our own crude awareness, perhaps the age-old message as only such a creature could send—that we knew not what we did. [TOP]

Joan McIntyre
Mind in the Waters
Two million whales have been killed in the last 50 years. The industry and the scientists connected with the industry have had an opportunity to examine the corpses of two million whales and yet maintain a need for still more to study. We can pile up the tables of weights and lengths and ages and measures until it reaches the sky, but it won’t get us an understanding of the living creature. The way to understand a living creature is to live respectfully in its presence, to approach it with tact, grace, and love, and while it is dying, sing human songs to it to aid its passage.
      I have stroked and swum with, and looked at these creatures, and felt their essence rise to meet me like perfume on a spring day. Touched by it, I felt gentler myself, more open to the possibilities that existed around me. There may be only way to begin to learn from them—and that is to begin. We would not be harmed by returning to the roots which once nourished us, which still, unseen, link together all life that lives, and feels, and thinks, and dies, on this, our common planet. [TOP]

Scott McVay
The Whaling Basement at Ayukawa
From this hour
I will carry perpetually
millions of molecules
of Ayukawa air
laced with dead whales.
How check the slaughter?
If I knew, I would be a prophet
and put whalers behind other plows. [TOP]

Mark J. Palmer
The difference in the view of the ocean as a precious sanctuary of life, or simply a crude dumping ground, is the difference in the way the sun strikes you reflected from the tail of a whale. [TOP]

Osaka
If we do
nothing,
in a few
years the
whale will live
only as a
legend,
a marine
Daidarabochi
who, it was
said, sang
unspeakably
beautiful
songs.

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