Photographer :
mym @ flickr
A fat kid at school with his mouth open and food stuck between his teeth has just left his family unit. They taught him the ins and outs of life; how and what to sing, where to go and what to eat.
He was born knowing how to fly.
Soaring with his mouth wide-open, food stuck in his teeth, minding his own business, the gunner spots him. They don’t recognise his grace, his majesty. An excruciating bolt of pain explodes in his side. Panicking he roles, and bucks: trying to free himself. As another lance of pain arches through his body but he gives up fighting and he is taken. The painful experience continues as bullets are fired into him but he doesn’t die. After twenty minutes and more bullets, his heart only then starts to miss a beat.
Through the whole process he can’t scream. He doesn’t have a voice. No whale has a voice.
First the blow; an explosion of water marking the whales place, then the slow, graceful rolling movement of its back and dorsal fin before it dives again. The next time it surfaces…
Boom! The harpoon is grenade-tipped so the noise is shocking. Not as shocking as the whales ninety minute death.
The whale dives, struggling. Mortally wounded, but not dead. The harpoon line goes taut. The whale surfaces again, another harpoon fired into its side. It is the bloodiest struggle of a dying life imaginable. The whale surfaces, blows bloody foam and dives again. Blood in the water. Its strength sapped, it surfaces once more.
A man on the bow fires his rifle; once, twice. It’s still alive. They secure it alongside for transit to the factory ship. Alive, but beaten, in extreme pain it has given up its fight, thick blood now pouring out its blowhole. Dr Harry Lillie, a ship’s physician on an Antarctic whaling expedition wrote: “If we can imagine a horse having two or three explosive spears stuck in its stomach and being made to pull a butcher’s truck through the streets of London while it pours blood into the gutter, we shall have an idea of the method of killing.”
Our whale is then hauled onto the factory ship, writhing again as if it knows its fate. The relief of death is slow in coming.
Throughout the world nations require an instantaneous death in the slaughter of livestock. Whales do not experience an instantaneous death. They deserve better. Whether a harpooned whale is the last of its species, or one of 100 000 the agony is the same, and is completely unjustifiable. The gunners themselves admit that if whales could scream the industry would stop. The Albatross below the waves… the many mariners need to ‘rise the morrow to morn’.
This article, by Ridley Leathart from Coonabarabran High School, was the Year 11/12 runner-up in What Matters? 2008.
What Matters? is a writing competition run by The Whitlam Institute that gives year 5-12 students in NSW and ACT a chance to say what matters in society today.
For more information go to: http://www.whitlam.org/whitlam/index.php
