A reader (via e-mail) did not enjoy, nor appreciate, recent orphaned baby whale coverage on this blog.
Dear Jerkoff,
I read yor dribble about Colin the whale and its obvious you are a heartless piece of shit.
The good thing is that there are probably very little people who read your crap - evidence by nil or very few comments to your shithouse stories. I just happened to stumble on it by accident and will never visit it again. The name of your stupid site is also dumb.
Its probably because there are so many arseholes in the world like you that, that the caring and compassionate people are more concerned with a starving baby whale, rather than people (who are complete strangers) who have died in plane crash etc and why the story of Colin the whale has taken precedent over other news stories.
Every day we hear all the other stories about human suffering and plight but it is extremely rare that a baby whale seperated from its mother is on our door step.
Once again the arsehole powers that be did nothing and took the easy option of killing the baby whale while they even botched that.
The stories that inspired this reader to write such an awesome tirade :
Orphaned, Dying Baby Whale To 11 Metre Yacht : "Will You Be My Mummy Now?"
Kill The Orphaned Baby Whale, Do It Now
2028 : Once Beloved 'Baby Whale' That Never Went Home Now Regarded By Most Sydney Beach Goers As "Monster Nuisance"
They Killed Colin
I did care. That's why I didn't want to see Colin, who turned out to be Collette, endure a days longer, far more painful, lingering death from starvation.
It seemed obvious from the beginning that we could not save this creature.
But it was a fascinating and rare event. And perhaps a test.
A massive, yet still infant, giant of the ocean arrives on the doorstep of a major world city, completely helpless.
We can throw robots at distant planets, but can we save the baby whale?
In four days, we couldn't come up with a solution. The scale of saving, and thereby, adopting a baby whale for the first year of its life was beyond us.
Thousands of litres a week of specially developed baby whale formula. A pool the size of a small town for the whale to swim in, for its first year or more. Collette would then have been more than 10 metres long and porking out at more than 25,000 kilos. And then there's the krill.
Most of the surface of our planet lies deep beneath the oceans and seas. We have barely even begun to explore this part, the larger part, of our world.
A humpback whale, like Collette, can swim halfway around the globe, every year, and can dive deeper than we can climb. Male humpbacks sing seduction songs double the length of Guns N' Roses ballads. They can live off their fat all winter, freeing up time to hang around whale watching boats, or roaming off our beaches and coastlines, making us love them even more.
Making us want to save them even more.
They can catch their food by blowing bubbles for fuck's sake. It's obvious who the better adapted species is.
But the humpback whale was almost wiped out existence, through hunting, in the middle of the 2oth century. The invention of the explosive harpoon made escaping with a few spears in the back impossible.
There's an estimated 80,000 humpback whales cruising oceans today.
We have a remarkable and rare love for whales, and ancient legends and art show that we have viewed them with awe for tens of thousands of years.
When the killfest ended, we had speared and harpooned, and then explosively harpooned, an estimated 250,000 (but likely far more) humpback whales. A worldwide ban became reality in the mid-1960s.
The whales are, however, making a comeback.
We now treat humpback whales with the kind of respect and care and public devotion we usually only reserve for other humans, or at least pampered-beyond-reason cats.
Migaloo is a white humpback whale, who famously roams the east coast of Australia most years. Migalooo has been granted a 500 metre exclusion zone when he swims by. Humans are not allowed, by law, to come within half a kilometre of this massive creature.
Now that is presidential treatment.
The followers of Green Jesus teachings, in this age of enviro-biblical apocalyptic imagery, will see the arrival of that baby whale as a sign, a test, a challenge, one that we failed because we couldn't save this little desperate miracle of nature.
But nature is cruel. Have you ever seen a huge black crow peck and then eat the eye of a shrieking lamb? This is behaviour we have deemed, morally, to be cruel.
For an abandoned animal to die a cruel death is natural. Parents walk, or swim away, the infant dies from hunger, exposure, or perhaps heartbreak.
We hate this, it kills us.
Of all the hours of the magnificent, majestic 'Planet Earth' series by David Attenborrough, it is the few minutes of a lost baby elephant running the wrong way in search of its mother, as dusty winds consume it, that haunts most who've seen it.
The passionate desire of so many people to want to save Colin (Collette, or 'Humpy', my choice) came from being human. Beyond nature.
To intervene, to want to save the helpless of another species, an entire species in fact, is something uniquely human. It is at the core of our species.
That the baby whale died was no epic failure on our part.
If it was a test, as the Green Jesus may one day claim, we passed because did not let it starve to death. We did not let nature take its course. We intervened, and ended it.
