Animal Rights, Human Wrongs

Abstract

At this moment workers on board the mother ship of a pirate whaling vessel are disassembling the carcass of a whale. Though officially protected by agreement of the International Whaling Commission, pirate whalers operate outside IWC regulations, and it is not too incredible to imagine them butchering a great blue whale, the largest creature ever known to have lived on the earth—larger than thirty elephants, larger even than three of the largest dinosaurs laid end to end. A good catch, this leviathan of the deep. And, increasingly, a rare one. For the great blue, like hundreds of other animal species, is endangered—may, in fact, already be beyond the point of recovery.

The main body of this essay was originally presented as one of a series of lectures at Muhlenberg College on the general topic of “Problems and Directions of the Post-Abundant Society,” March 1979. It has appeared in a slightly revised form in Environmental Ethics (Winter 1980) in a Polish translation in Etyka (18, 1981), and, as one often essays, in Tom Regan, All That Dwell Therein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).