The Interspecies Newsletter

1 From our website: the featured interspecies story for June

What Interspecies Is explains in a few succinct paragraphs why the new generation of Earth artists must be given far more recognition and support as innovative educators and activists serving the greater healing of nature over the longest term possible.

2 Interspecies Close Up

Perhaps the most creative interaction that Interspecies.com has ever recorded with dolphins occurred in September 2002 in the cold waters off Port Hardy British Columbia. Interspecies.com editor, Jim Nollman was playing guitar through an underwater speaker on the Shelmar, skippered by Bob Wood, when the boat was surrounded by 300 Pacific whitesided dolphins accompanied by three humpback whales. Over an entire day, the boat was never out of site of this vast herd. Up to six dolphins at a time swarmed within inches of the speaker and hydrophone, vocalizing with rare fidelity, improvising rhythms and melodies in close synchrony with the raga being played into the water. The result was over six hours of recording, eventually whittled down to a contiguous six minutes and named Dolphin Realtime.

Are the dolphins and the musician interacting? The answer depends on whom you ask. Almost everyone hears the call and response. Musicians often comment about the sophistication of harmony and rhythm. Many whale scientists, however, declare that nothing is happening. Who can be certain, they declare, that the dolphins would not be making the same sounds if we weren't present.

Why is it that so many scientists remain unwilling to allow that some animal species may distinguish between music and noise? And why is it that so many whale scientists believe that humans must not attempt to create a common ground with the large-brained wild cetaceans who, themselves, seem to encourage such interaction? Does it invalidate a biological preconception of what animals may think and feel.

3 Sea Shepherd Society takes on Whalers and Hype

Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society recently announced that their ship' Farley Mowat' will spend the latter part of 2005 and 2006 intercepting the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Oceans. The Board of the SSS made this decision in response to Japan's plan to target endangered humpback and fin whales in Antarctica. Paul recently published an essay about the language of exploiters, excerpted below. Click here to read more about the group's unique activist stance.

Commentary by Paul Watson

We need to put an end to jargon that is employed to justify ecological exploitation.

Let's start with the Canadian seal hunt. This is not a hunt. No one is tracking, stalking, or pursuing seals. The sealers merely walk through a nursery of defenseless seal pups and whack them on the head. The little fellas can't escape, and they can't defend themselves. Let's call it what it is: a slaughter or a massacre.

Nor do we harvest seals or fish or any other animal. We harvest corn, oranges, or apples but not seals or fish. I notice farmers don't use the term for cows or pigs. They slaughter their cows and pigs. So' why the use of this word?  It's just an attempt to remove the ugliness of their actions.

The Canadian government has tried to label baby seals as adults by defining an adult as any seal over three weeks age.  It seems to me that any seal that can't swim, can't escape, and is helpless on an ice floe at three weeks of age qualifies as a baby seal.

And this word sustainable? This gem was dreamed up by that whale-killing former Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Bruntland. She was all for conservation so long as it was outside the borders of Norway and did not involve Norwegian fishing vessels. This word popped up around the time of the U.N. Conference on the Environment and Development in 1992. What does it mean? After you strip away the spin and the green-washing it simply means: business as usual. For example' there a great deal of talk about the value of "sustainable fisheries." In fact, practically every commercial fishery in the world is in a state of commercial collapse, yet we still find "sustainably-fished" cod or salmon, (at least it says so on the label).

Another word is stocks. It sounds as if the ocean is our private warehouse. So we have fisheries that "managethe stocks" or the "stocks have been reduced", etc. The correct term is populations. We don't say there is an "unhealthy stock of humans messing up the environment."

When you put the three above-mentioned words together' you get the "sustainable harvesting of stocks, humanely harvested' of course.‰

Which bring us to the term humane as in "humane killing." This term suggests that killing is acceptable so long as we can appease our guilt by making it sound okay by humanizing the action. This' of course' has led to the absurd description of the Canadian seal hunt or the Japanese dolphin slaughter as "humane sustainable harvesting of stocks of seals/dolphins." Yet imagine the outrage if animal shelters put down dogs with a club instead of lethal injection.

And finally the word conservative. It means 'to conserve', to maintain the status quo. When did Conservative come to mean undermining the Endangered Species Act or the Clean Air Act? When did conservative mean being anti-conservationist? As a conservationist, I've always viewed myself as a conservative but now I find that the right-wing, anti-conservationists who destroy forests' overfish the oceans' and pollute our rivers are calling themselves conservative and accusing me of being a radical for working to conserve nature and endangered species.

Norway is one of the last whaling nations. As someone who has attended the International Whaling Commission's meetings, I can attest that the Norwegian reps are the least endearing of the whole lot of them, acting like thugs declaring a god-given right to kill whales. Yet Norway is also one of the most socially progressive nations in terms of environment and art. So you might well ask, how does a creative, socially progressive Norwegian express her feelings about her government killing whales as the political expression of some atavistic cultural longing for the good old days of Viking mayhem? Whale Chong is a flash presentation/game, in English and Norwegian, created by a socially progressive Norwegian artist, with the help of Interspecies.com and the Norwegian Cultural Council, that attempts to confront this conundrum. Don't ask what it all means.



The Society for Marine Mammalogy will be holding the 16th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals on 12-16 December, 2005, in San Diego, CA. For more information on the Society for Marine Mammalogy, and perhaps glean some hint of why the society has an undeclared taboo against interspecies communication, visit their website.



job of the month OK, get this. Live in Scotland. Travel to Australia. Work towards a higher degree hanging out on the southern ocean with humpback whales for months at a time studying the lingual, cultural, and aesthetic components of the species' gorgeous songs. And get paid.



This webpage provides a list of downloadable .pdf files of some of the best papers being published about animals (well cetaceans and elephants) that possess culture, oral tradition, possibly politics. If you like what you find, you might write some of the authors and encourage them to expand their vision to include animal aesthetics, education, ethics. Before I die, I hope to read a study of the octopus's visions of God. A truly wonderful image.

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