Former vegan, current pescatarian here.

Dont stop hunting, please. Humans did a phenomenal job of ensuring a required hunting season for deer by wiping out all the natural predators, now without them we have to have culls. If you participate in said culls, PLEASE eat the meat, use the pelt, give the antlers to your dog. We've forced ourselves into a position where some of us MUST take up the mantle of predator. If you choose to, just be responsible with the carcass so it didn't die for no good reason.

Edit: accidentally lied, I'm not a vegetarian I'm a pescatarian who outside of her 6 shrimp a week is vegan.

Only time I've eaten meat in the past ~30 years was when I ate some invasive fish that had been caught in a killathon to restore native habitat. Not that it's my role to "give you a pass," but I certainly do in this case!

Pretty sure you can hunt nursing deer in most places.

Edit: can't! You can't hunt while the babies are babies.

I only drink polar bear milk. I find the chalky cod liver oil taste delightful.

So are pigs.

You're right. Probably should be mostly figuratively to humans, but also literally. And we also do it figuratively to the whales by destroying and polluting the ocean ecosystems.

I doubt, it's going to make any sudden jumps. We have various vegan meat alternatives already, which are good, and you still have plenty people that feel personally attacked by the existence of morals, because they base their personality on eating dead animals.

It's not just whales, one could draw the same comic about other animals being hunted or factory farmed, it would be very traumatic to live through. In fact Disney made an animated one about deer.

I thought I provided that connection by mentioning the harm we're doing to almost all animals.

Please explain how someone is being a hypocrite for caring about species that are heading towards extinction

you're right, I should actually support whaling.

Depending on which Native Americans we're taking about, some of them drove entire herds of bison over cliffs. Our European ancestors hunted the mastodon to extinction, I think? In Australia and New Zealand a bunch of reptiles and the moa birds were wiped out by humans.

I don't think most humans are ever thinking about genocide exactly (probably some are/were), but that they're focused on feeding and defending their communities and not considering the balance of the ecosystem.

I know it's not, it's just the garbage excuse they've been using for decades

We did almost hunt whales to extinction, but it wasn’t meat we were hunting for, it was their oily fat.

I don't have a problem with people eating meat. I eat meat. I just don't like the way it's farmed what I'd propose is a largely vegetarian diet punctuated by fish or wild meat every so often. Like fish twice a week and venison on Sunday or something. As for whale, it's not really commonly eaten in many places and as long as people don't take too many, it's not necessarily a bad thing.

To be fair, a lot of humans also seem to lack the intellectual capacity to consider the ethical implications of their consumption, specially when confronted with the unimaginable cruelty and suffering we cause to animals just to eat something tasty with low individual effort.

The environment has been shaped by countless extinctions over millennia. The environment does not need white knights, it simply is. Another entirely is what we would like it to be. A whale "tracking the ethical and environmental impacts of its pod’s consumption" would be at a competitive disadvantage to those who don't. specially given that they are carnivores who don't have the privilege of omnivore white knighting. Not eating meat is them dying en masse unless one of them is able to survive off of plants somehow, if at all. Bulls will skewer anyone who go near their territory, and they are herbivores, nature does not share your concerns not because of intellectual capacity but because they don't need to.

We can track the ethical and environmental impacts, but we only do so within our own perspective. It is a trait of any animal to show empathy for that which they do care about, and ignorance and even disdain for that which they do not. People who care about the feelings of animals, feelings they do have, do so because they have the luxury of not becoming fodder. Not only people, but animals in captivity who are fed and need not worry about where their food or if they are food have been shown to express this notion as well.

Life exists to survive. Don't think your ethical and environmental concerns will afford you likewise considerations from other animals, from humans to whales alike. Just because you feel and because they feel does not mean they will care. You pick your fights, you want to care about whales, you might end up caring too much about everything before ever finding yourself getting kicked to the ground because of a dystopian hellscape that was too out of focus for you coming from your own species. Will you ask if the concerns you chose to erect walls around helped you out then?

Our ecosystems are doomed to change just as we are, but we should not accelerate their change unless we are ready to change ourselves. Unfortunately, the entire ocean is changing now, and if anything major governments driven by profits have made sure we are not ready to change. F-ing whaling is the least of my worries nowadays because so much more has become concerning.

I harpooned his mama 3 times just last week.