One of the reasons that I don’t spend much time in online communities focused around cetaceans anymore, despite having a lifelong interest in these animals, is the rather zealous and over-the-top idealisation of orcas, especially the Southern Resident population, as being more noble and moral than humans. And, indeed, more noble and moral than other cetaceans - I once had a far too long conversation with someone who is convinced that the Southern Residents are better than all other whales and dolphins because, unlike dolphins, they don’t kidnap and murder baby porpoises. So I have to admit to feeling some glee to read that the Southern Residents have been… kidnapping and murdering baby porpoises. Turns out they’re not so noble and moral after all.
Orcas are amazing animals, to be sure. They are genuinely intelligent beings, and their capacity to learn new skills is both fascinating and worthy of admiration. But lets admire them for what they are: just as wickedly clever and capable of cruelty as any other animal on the planet, including humans. It does neither us nor them any good to put them up on a pedestal as somehow morally superior to us.
Well said. There’s a part of me that desperately wants to know there is a true, pure species on this planet that doesn’t stoop to sick levels of cruelty, but that’s not reality. Bambi noms baby birds, cetaceans mutilate each other’s babies, and we do the unthinkable every second of every day. Depressing, but here we are.
I guess maybe the species that are exclusively herbivorous. Obviously Bambi and horses and a lot of other ungulates don’t qualify. But how about the humble flat periwinkle? They spend their whole lives just vibing on seaweed, which is the only thing they have the equipment to eat. They literally just wander around licking seaweed, while being bright yellow.
I think morality is largely a matter of frame of reference. When humans look at morality, more often than not they’re not looking to completely redesign the society they live in, but to act morally within that context. There are going to be parts of that context that are more or less taken for granted, and while it may be more moral to investigate and seek to change these cultural and environmental conditions, that’s not the only avenue for moral behavior.
Someone who lives in the context of their culture and does their best to help others within that context rather than by seeking to eradicate the conditions that cause the suffering may still be argued to be acting in a positive way morally. It may be that snuffing out the root cause of a particular plight is outside of their reach, while lending assistance to those who suffer from it is much more achievable. Especially if they would ostensibly support such a change, it’s hard to find major fault for not setting their sights high enough or risking enough on a presumed positive outcome.
So if I were looking for moral actors in other species, I’d start by looking for instances of aberrations from more or less species-wide behaviors that lean toward the cruel side. I don’t think looking to the behavior as a species as a whole is necessarily the place to start.
Frankly, I don’t think that humans should typically be viewed as remotely ‘moral’ on a species-wide level when considering their collective behaviors. We’ve turned torture and oppression into a science in a way that other species don’t come anywhere close to. We’ve created cultures that focus the entirety of their energy on consolidating power as much as humanly possible, favoring parasitizing laborers and artisans to extract as much value as possible with no regard for the creations of human hands of the needs of human bodies and minds.
The idea of a human judging any species on this planet on a moral basis is absurd.
A cetacean expert I know calls it the magical orca effect. People think they’re like unicorns prancing about on rainbows. They’re quite scary, you can’t attribute malice to an animal but some of the things they do are quite brutal.
“Magical orca effect” is the best terminology I’ve ever heard for this! I’ve found it tends to be focused on the fish-eating orcas, like the Southern Residents, while the mammal-eating ones seem to get quietly written off as “not real orcas”, because they dispel the “magic” of peaceful, highly moral, family-oriented orcas that people like to picture.
Of course, if one starts assigning human moral values to orcas, the Southern Residents could certainly be described as these magical, loyal beings who love their families above all else. But equally, given they only breed and interact with their own family (approx 70 individuals, they’re horrifically inbred at this point), even to the exclusion of other neighbouring orca populations that share their culture… they start looking like a weird, isolationist, fundamentalist cult, where the grandmothers arrange for their sons to marry their granddaughters because the people living in the next town are just “not the right kind of people”.
“If we judge them by human moral values, then that includes the bad as well as the good, so maybe we shouldn’t assign our moral values to them at all” was not a terribly popular opinion in the cetacean-loving community. Neither was thinking other cetaceans are interesting too. (Beaked whales forever! ❤️)
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