The killer whales swam to the end of the ocean and looked over the edge, whereupon they were driven mad by its vastness.
In the twilight hours of the day, when many a young neighbor’s internet connection turns to Warcraft, Dr. Unexploited and I like to gather together enough bits and dribbles of bandwidth to watch a nature documentary. The best series we’ve seen, by a nautical mile, is The Blue Planet, which taught us that deep sea creatures fart rainbows.
What we also learned from The Blue Planet is that killer whales are evil. There are two kinds of killer whale: the swift, merciless predators and the psychopathic mammal murderers.* They’ve run an expert PR campaign, tricking us into making movies like Free Willy when what they really deserve is Life in Prison Without the Possibility of Parole Willy and convincing us to call them “orcas” because “killer whales” is so hurtful and negative, as if spending six hours wearing down and drowning a baby gray whale, then eating only its tongue weren’t hurtful and negative. As Dr. Unexploited put it, they’re the Reavers of the sea.
What I’m getting at is that while humans may be irresponsibly carnivorous, we’re not as bad as nature itself. You can put down that knife, Mark Zuckerberg: we Americans consider our lobsters with much more reverence than a killer whale grants its Whale Jaw McNuggets. Furthermore, as the linked article points out, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to get in touch with the process of meat consumption by doing only the slaughtering, not the butchering. You know who else would slaughter an animal and then let others deal with the remains? That’s right: a killer whale.
Anyway, as I’m not much of a meat-eater myself, I don’t have a huge stake in the Great Meat Debate (pun not intended but still appreciated). Still, as the inaugural purpose of this blog was skewering the poorly considered sanctimony of Bay Area food trends, I could not let this latest and most sanctimonious one pass. I’m open to the idea that eating meat may be wrong; I’m also open to the possibility that it may not be wrong. But if you do think killing an animal for food is wrong, killing it yourself does not make it less wrong. You’re not Ned Stark carrying out an unpleasant but necessary (in his view) sentence; you’re just trying to feel less bad about indulging in a fully optional violation of your ethical code.
By the way, as I learned from classic Korean drama Dae Jang Geum, whale meat tastes a little bit like beef. Not that I’m suggesting orca burgers for your Memorial Day barbecue. No, not suggesting that at all.
*Actually, there are at least three kinds of killer whale, but the third type falls into one or both of these categories.
