Republished from Caribbean Net News!
Caribbean Net News reported on Wednesday that St. Kitts and Nevis Fisheries Minister Cedric Liburd has asserted the
need for the Caribbean to engage in the whaling industry for the development and benefit of its tourism sector.
But, upon reading this report, it took all the intestinal fortitude I could muster to contain the gastric reflux the very notion of this prospect triggered. After all, slaughtering whales in our pristine Caribbean Sea conjures up all of the putrid ghastliness of slaughtering baby seals on the virgin snow caps of the North Atlantic.
Our cloistered sea – relative to the sprawling ocean – makes spilling the bloody entrails of whales here analogous to beating the crap out of baby seals in a storage freezer. This makes the prospect of whaling here all the more nauseating.
In fairness to Liburd, however, he was probably just trying to quell the hysteria regional heads of government incited a few weeks ago. That’s when they practically proclaimed that the new U.S. passport regulation, which takes effect in January, will portend our economic doom.
Indeed, the dreaded impact of this regulation comes on the heels of the
- demise of our online gambling industry
- split in our banana exports
- threats to our sugar exports.
Given that, one can see how an ingenuous person like Liburd might consider slaughtering whales an economic lifesaver. This, especially when one considers the disparate impact all of these economic shocks are already having on our fellow natives in the Eastern Caribbean States like St. Kitts and Nevis.
Last June, the International Whaling Commission debated whether the whale population had grown so much over the past quarter century that the moratorium imposed to save them from extinction is no longer necessary. Here is how I contributed to that debate in “Fatuous anti-whaling argument: free Willie or we’ll destroy your economy…,” June 23, 2006:
As one for whom commercial whaling is abhorrent, I resent this high-minded attempt to undermine the economy of any country in the Caribbean because its government does not find commercial whaling abhorrent. In fact, I find the sewage that cruise ships dump in our crystal-clear waters infinitely more abhorrent. Yet I would never countenance threatening the livelihood of people who depend on the revenues those ships generate to express my environmental outrage….
Environmentalists are up in arms about people hunting whales. But these avengers would prove far more useful to Mother Nature if they could get cruise ships to hold their crap to dump back home, instead of leaving it behind like bobbing logs in our Caribbean Sea.
That said, it reflects enlightened regional interest for our leaders to accept inducements from Japan to support whaling in the Southern Ocean. It’s just penny wise and pound foolish for them to feel obliged to adopt Japan’s whaling practices in the Caribbean Sea.
Ironically enough, the most convincing argument against the need for us to engage in whaling is the patently disingenuous, indeed fatuous, argument Liburd proffers in favor of it:
We have all these tourists coming here, what are we going to feed them with, are we going to ask the United States to send the fish here?
After all, unless St. Kitts is planning to target Japanese tourists – whose mammalian taste for whales rivals their barbaric taste for horses – one wonders which tourists he’s so concerned about being able to feed.
Seriously, whaling in the Caribbean could not be more inconsistent with the macroeconomic factors that drive our tourism sector. In fact, the Americans, Canadians and Europeans on whom we rely for our daily bread harbor a well-documented aversion to hunting whales, to say nothing of eating them. Therefore, we may have to eat those whales ourselves if St. Kitts and Nevis inaugurates commercial whaling in our midst.
Meanwhile, is it just me or is there something even culturally anathema about Ahab wannabes in whaling boats crisscrossing cruise ships and luxury yachts to harpoon their moby dicks…?