Orcas are Nature's Humans

I heard somewhere that the reason that animals are "better" than people is because they only kill when they need to, not for fun. I think I heard this from a dirty, stinking hippie, but it really stuck with me, just like patchouli stink sticks to a dirty, stinking hippie.

Anyway, the idea is bullshit; as anybody who owns a cat can tell you, animals kill other animals for fun all the time. Another, more convincing case (after all, perhaps cats are sadistic because they spend so much time around bad old humans--right, hippies?) is that of the orca, or killer whale. A BBC nature film I saw the other day, entitled "Seas of Life," featured a long-ish segment on the killer whale and its penchant for harrassing, torturing, and killing other sea life.

Now, you might say (if you are a hippie or an overly-serious person), "'torture' has no meaning in the animal kingdom--you, the human, are imposing that designation on the whale." You would be right, except that orcas play with their food. See, when a pod of killer whales stalks the calf of a larger species, it chases the baby and mother to tire the younger one out. Once tired, the juvenile can be held down by the orcas' bodies and drowned. The killer whales do this, but they stop from time to time, back off, and let the calf catch its breath. Is that natural? Is it serving some purpose? It appears to be only a way of prolonging the hunt--in other words, it's a way for the orcas to derive more satisfaction from the kill and the act of killing itself. In other words, it's sadism.

Similarly, killer whales will often charge into the shallows and catch seals in their mouths, stunning the seals so they can be eaten. However, on "Seas of Life," the killer whales continued to catch seals even after they were done feeding. So, when the whales were no longer hungry, they kept on grabbing seals, stunning them, and then carrying them out to sea. There, the orcas flipped the live seals back and forth with their mouths and tails, vaulting them high into the air and, eventually, killing them. The narrator claimed this was done so the whales could keep their hunting skills sharp, but they just finished eating a bunch of seals. Sharp enough? I would argue that this behavior represents a possibility that naturalists apparently refuse to consider: killer whales are psychotic assholes. Not a catchy title for a movie, I'll grant you: "Free Willy: the Psychotic Asshole Whale."

Anyway, killer whales do one other thing that reminds me of people. After they kill a whale calf (which is pretty hard to do and seems too time-consuming in an ocean teeming with smaller, easier prey--do they derive satisfaction from the fact that they are killing a calf in front of its helpless mother?) the only thing they eat is the tongue and lower jaw. Kind of like how people eat pate--you don't think the rest of that goose gets used, do you? What kind of thing is that to do? Is it "natural" to spend four hours making a kill and then to only eat one piece of the body, only about 1/10 the total mass--particularly when it's a pod of 6-8 killer whales that have to eat?

This all seems unnatural to me. I think whales, as a higher species of mammal, are fucking sick--they've developed a taste for pointless slaughter. They must be stopped, and so I propose a renewed effort to find things, frivolous things, that can be made from their hides. We will hunt them to extinction for the sake of fashion and, in my heart at least, because the world already has enough pleasure killers in it. Either that, or they can hunt us. But one of us has to go.