August 1, 2001

First of all, my thanks to Em for bringing to my attention that the email forms weren't working. Second of all, my apologies to everybody who tried to use it. I got none of those emails. Third of all, my contempt towards geocities staff, who, rather than catching errors and giving off error messages such as "not all necessary fields were filled", directed errors in the script to a blank page. Thus, nobody KNEW there was an error in the first place. How stupidly can you write code? Stupider than this? It would be a challenge, that much is for certain. In any case, the email forms now work.

Onto the topic of the day. Whales! Whales are beautiful creatures I suppose. I don't really have an opinion on it. But I do have an opinion on whale watching. The facts are, that whale watching is getting bigger and bigger each year. In addition, whale population is getting smaller and smaller. There is very clear evidence.....accepted by all except whale watching tour companies, that whale watching is harmful to the health of whales. It disrupts their natural life.

I guess the two most important things that any animal does is eat and sleep. Whale watching expeditions mess up both. Whales used to sleep in the day. No more. They can't afford to sleep in the daytime, with all of these boats milling about. Whale watching expeditions make it more difficult for whales to find food. Simply by virtue of being a disturbance, whale watching changes the natural patterns of the whales. Think about it. Wouldn't you be distracted if you had a hundred boats surrounding you from dusk till dawn? I'm not exaggerating. A hundred. The whales swim faster and dive deeper when boats are around. This adds up to 3% extra energy expended per year. Quite a bit.

They justify it by saying that the educational part of whale watching outweighs the harm done to the whales through whale watching. I don't buy that. Whale watching isn't education. It's entertainment. If you want to get educated, you don't go out there and look at them for a couple hours. You get a degree in marine biology and go out there and study them for months at a time. Or else you pick up a book that somebody who's studied them for months at a time has written. That's education.

Paying a company a hundred bucks to take you out there so you can snap off a few pictures for the photo album....all the while hurting the whale, and in fact, harming the long term survival of the species.....now that's just plain mean.