Week 5: Desertification & Ocean Issues

I’m not going to get into the ethics of killing various animals, because that always ends in a negative-sum game. Instead, I want to focus on how this is another form of factory killing for mass consumption, which has a plethora of issues.

I originally went to Youtube to find a clip of Hayden Panettiere crying when she went on a whaling protest, because, thanks to VH1 and pop culture, I cannot think about whaling without a blubbering Hayden popping into my mind. There was a video that showed how mass whale and dolphin poaching goes down, and it really reminded me of the factory farming and calculated mass slaughtering of cows, chickens, pigs, you name it. My environmental health background makes me cringe at the mere idea of factory killing, so when I watched the Youtube videos, all I could think about was the myriad of health concerns that arise with poaching in that manner, especially in the ocean, which can harbor its own environmental health issues before the addition of blood and guts.

Have you ever seen Food Inc (or read the book)? Do you know anything about the health hazards of factory slaughter houses? The chance of the spread of disease rises exponentially in the slaughterhouse, and wouldn’t you say that the slaughtering of dolphins in the video above can be classified as a systematic factory slaughter? I don’t think that much blood spillage can be safe for the other aquatic life in the area. I also don’t think the surge of ocean water into a cavity of an animal meant for human comsumption is safe either.