Remind me why we whale again.

Japan’s appetite for whale meat wanes

Justin McCurry in Osaka, The Guardian

Thursday 14 June 2012 05.19 EDT

Junko Sakuma, a freelance journalist, said the body responsible for selling meat from Japan’s controversial “scientific” whaling programme had failed to sell 908 tonnes of the 1,211-tonne catch, despite holding 13 public auctions since last October.

…

Sakuma said the oversupply of whale meat, despite pockets of demand for the highest quality produce, had made Japan’s lethal research programme unsustainable.

…

Late last year, it was revealed the government used 2.28bn yen (£18.5m) from the 11 March earthquake recovery fund, on top of its existing $6m (£3.87m) annual subsidy, to pay for the most recent Antarctic hunt.

The fisheries agency said the use of the fund was justified because one of the towns destroyed by the tsunami was a whaling port.

This is about the 3rd year in a row of declining catches and failure to sell even a majority of the harvest.

Complex thinking goes beyond primates: Dolphins understand zero, elephants rescue each other

By Associated Press

June 24

Dolphins are so distantly related to humans that it’s been 95 million years since we had even a remotely common ancestor. Yet when it comes to intelligence, social behavior and communications, some researchers say dolphins come as close to humans as our ape and monkey cousins.

Maybe closer.

“They understand concepts like zero, abstract concepts. They do everything that chimpanzees do and bonobos can do,” said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University who specializes in dolphin research. “The fact is that they are so different from us and so much like us at the same time.”