Why I Only Eat Tuna-safe Dolphin
Last night when my roommate offered to make tuna-melts for supper my response was to quip “No! Eating tuna is cruel! Let’s have dolphin-melts instead.” And I was only half joking.
Why is there “dolphin-safe tuna” available in the super-market but not “tuna-safe dolphin”? Two conservation-related reasons are obvious: first, dolphins reproduce relatively slowly and have few natural predators and, as such, their populations could not sustain being hunted by humans for food on a large scale (incidentally, to a lesser extent the same is probably true of tuna). Second, dolphin-safe methods of fishing for tuna or other commercially fished sea creatures may result in less by-catch* of other species – including but not limited to dolphins. So wanting to buy dolphin-safe tuna is entirely justified.
However, my guess is that most people that buy dolphin-safe seafood are not so much motivated by these reasons as they are by a conviction that dolphins are more intelligent, more sentient, and, they assume, are therefore more intrinsically valuable creatures than tuna. I bet dolphins rank up there with whales, elephants, and the great apes on the animal hierarchy of most Canadians. Apart from other hypocrisies that this represents in our thinking about other species (more on this later), this view of dolphins may just be out-dated and wrong.
There have been recent studies indicating that dolphin “language” may not be nearly as complex as we once thought. It seems like their squeals and clicks are mostly used for echolocation (like bats) in dark, murky water and only for rudimentary communication. A relatively large brain is a trait often associated with intelligence; but while a dolphin’s brain is large, it actually has fairly low neural tissue density and contains greater proportions of plain old fat and water. Regions of the dolphin brain that do appear to be highly developed are those used in aural cognition, again likely to do with echolocation and not necessarily language or other intelligences. So, contrary to the popular depiction of Flipper, dolphins might be similar in smarts to your average border collie, but not much more. (See chapter 8 of “Do Animals Think?” by Clive D. L. Wynne for a more detailed review and discussion of these studies).
Granted, Canadians don’t eat a lot of border collie either, but we do eat literally tonnes and tonnes of pork each year. And a pig is probably about as intelligent and sentient as a dolphin, at least as far as we can discern based on the available empirical evidence. Worse, the vast majority of our pigs are raised in utterly deplorable conditions. The fact that we have a separate term – pork – to differentiate the food from the animal it comes from – a pig – is perhaps more than just linguistic convenience: it is indicative of our attempt to dissociate the two in our mind and alleviate some of the guilt. (I realize that vegans, vegetarians, observant Seventh Day Adventists, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else that abstains from eating pork is exempt from this particular criticism, but they may well be guilty of similar prejudices regarding other species). Comparing pigs and dolphins may be like comparing apples and oranges, but this is precisely the incongruous double-standard that we are guilty of when it comes to our valuation of the various non-human creatures with whom we share the planet.
What does this all mean? For starters, we should admit to the often arbitrary rationale behind our valuation of species and be less quick to damn differing attitudes that strike us as repulsive and wrong: the Chinese eat dog, South Americans eat guinea pig, the Japanese and Icelanders eat whale, and the Dutch…ahem… eat horse. And, for an example within Canada, consider the fur industry: baby seals may be cute, but their slaughter is relatively humane and sustainable when compared to our factory-farm treatment of pigs and the environmental impact of industrial pork production (not to mention poultry or beef).
To borrow from Matthew 7:3, why do we see the dolphin (or dog, or guinea pig, or whale, or horse, or whatever) that is on our brother’s plate, but do not notice the pork that is on our own plate?
So do I actually eat dolphin? No… but I might give it a try if the opportunity arose while visiting a culture where it was part of their traditional diet. And if I do refuse to eat it, it will be on the grounds of objection to unsustainable dolphin hunting, not because dolphins are “just somehow better”.
*Footnote: By-catch is the term given to other sea life that is caught along with the target species. Most by-catch is killed or seriously injured as a result of damage from the nets, line, hooks and/or being dragged long distances. By-catch is usually discarded at sea.
Dave Bruinsma is an alumnus of the King’s University College, having graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies (biology concentration) in 2005.
Posted: August 27th, 2009 under Bruinsma, King's Alumni.
Tags: animal rights, dolphins, environmental ethics, Food, pigs, tuna
Comments
Comment from The Pad
Time August 28, 2009 at 8:22 am
OK Joel -thanks for our first “Boo!”
I’ve reset it to allow comments without registering. We’ll see how it goes…
Comment from robertbrink
Time August 28, 2009 at 8:49 am
Mr Bruinsma’s post reminded me of this Edmonton Journal headline from about a week ago: “Bears feast on prized mini-donkeys in southern Alberta.” That sums up our strange ‘animal attachment differential’ quite nicely. I think ‘prized mini-donkey’ sounds delicious, for what it’s worth.
A food blogger at the National Post constructed this rubric for food-eating-willingness:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theappetizer/archive/2009/08/27/what-will-you-not-eat-find-your-food-threshold.aspx
I think I’m an eight or nine on the scale. However, Canada’s current Governor General won my respect when she ate raw seal heart…
Comment from arlette
Time August 29, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Interesting piece, David! I am reminded as I read your article that the original plan, as it is articulatd in Genesis, was for us to be vegetarians. Is our permission to eat meat merely a concession to our fallen nature? Or, is there another way to view the situation. Theologians please enlighten us.
Comment from DaveB
Time September 15, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Shortly after writing this post, I read an article by Jared Diamond entitled “Easter Island’s End”, published in Discover Magazine in 1995 (I suspect that some form of this article was later incorporated into his longer book, “Collapse”).
In the article, Diamond describes archeological/anthropological studies of the garbage sites used by the Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island during approximately 900-1300 AD (before their society’s catastrophic collapse). Pollen and bone-fragment analysis of samples taken from the garbage heaps were used to determine what sorts (and relative proportions) of plants and animals were being used/eaten back then.
Guess what they concluded the ancient Easter Islanders’ main source of dietary protien was? Yup, that’s right: dolphin!
Comment from DaveB
Time September 15, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Re the food-eating willingness rubric that Mr. Brink provided a link to:
I find that the rubric is fairly useless, as it assumes that everyone has the same hierarchy of food items that make them progressively more squeamish, which simply isn’t the case. Sure, we may all have a hierarchy, but the order of the items will vary widely from person to person (let alone culture to culture) and will be based on more complex rationale than simply squeamishness.
Actually, I think that I think that Adam McDowell’s post is basically in agreement with my own (above), in that cultural context and environmental ethic should (and most often do, even if its a mis-guided ethic) influence our food choices. People’s aversion to eating dolphin has nothing to do with squeamishness, its because they think its wrong.
I am surprised he expresses so much interest in the rubric, given the assumptions it makes about “typical” people’s food choice hierarchy, as if it is universal and operates independant of environmental ethic, cultural context, or the details of the particular history of a particular food item in question (not all pork is “factory-farmed”, etc.).
Comment from rbrink
Time September 15, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Here’s an interesting discussion of the dolphin thing: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/09/15/the-ethics-of-flipper-how-saving-dolphins-is-creating-an-ecological-disaster/
You’re right about the scale Dave. It is only insightful as a contextless measure of food aversion according to the standard feelings (both moral and squemishness related) of longstanding middle class members of North American society.
Comment from DaveB
Time September 18, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Dear rbrink,
The author of the post in the link you provided (above) brings up an interesting point with his claim that dolphin-safe fishing methods may only be good for dolphins and actually be very bad for just about every other species of sea creature. Thus, animal preference hierarchies aside, dolphin-safe tuna is probably “environmentally worse” than the alternative! I did not know this when I wrote my post.
The blog link you provided references yet another blog, which is also quite interesting:
http://southernfriedscience.com/2009/02/16/the-ecological-disaster-that-is-dolphin-safe-tuna/
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Comment from joelkelly
Time August 27, 2009 at 11:40 pm
on the topic of “dolphin safe” tuna, here’s an interesting post on the way it is obtained, and how it pretty much sucks: http://southernfriedscience.com/2009/02/16/the-ecological-disaster-that-is-dolphin-safe-tuna/
also, boo to this blog for making me register to comment. the internet doesn’t work that way!