For those of you who are not familiar with the whole idea of whales, here it is:
They are very, very big.
And they are very, very strong, and they are absolutely impervious to the idea that human lives are sacrosanct.
So, should you care to, say, go scuba diving with whales and crawl on top of a mother and her calf, and she sees fit to connipt slightly, sending you and your buddy on an excruciating, nine-hour journey to the nearest hospital, where you mist up as you give media interviews about how beautiful and Oprah-like the experience was, and how eager you are to repeat it, don’t be surprised if, somewhere out in the depths, the traditional clicks and whistles of whalesong are enlivened with an occasional evil chuckle.
In related news, in possible payback for the ongoing Japanese whale hunt (for “research” purposes, remember, said research resulting in such scientifically advanced products as fast food whale burgers) a lost and apparently confused sperm whale which was being pestered by several boatloads of Japanese fishermen deliberately flipped over one of the boats, resulting in the death of a 58-year-old man. At the time, the man had been engaged in an attempt to direct the whale from the bay in which it had strayed to the open ocean. Japanprobe has two videos and the Reuters report.
Don’t mess with Moby Dick.
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raincoaster 
RC “… [Whales] are absolutely impervious to the idea that human lives are sacrosanct”
The Marchioness of WitchHampton etc
Your Grace
Nervous as I am about disagreeing with your ever-informative & incisive servant Mlle RegenCoaster, on this occasion we are not entirely of the same mind
What I find remarkable about Whales is the extraordinary lengths that these Cetaceans go in order to avoid any harm to homo pSeudo sapiens, even in the face of extreme provokation
Yr Grace’s obedient servant etc
G Eagle
Examples, please? You’ve got two counter-examples right there.
I think M. Eagle has a point.
Consider the number of humans who pester whales by say, running them over in z-boats, harpooning them, dangling microphones in their blowholes etc.
Consider the ratio of human injuries to whale injuries, and the number of fatalities on each side. If the Japanese alone “research” (the kenjii characters meaning “whale research” actually add up to “fatty sushi”) a hundred whales, and if the human body count is off by as much as 100%, then the ratio is either 50:1 or 100:0.
Given the amount of interface time that those big, big whales have with those relatively tiny z-boats, you’d expect something much more like parity. Whales are clearly pacifists on the order of Ghandi.
He’s definitely correct. Whales are not among the animals who consider humans to be prey.
As a gulf islander what really pisses me off is the “killer whale” label. They are orcas folks. And as far as I tell there has never been a single case of an orca hunting or killing a human. However, humans and most particularly Japanese people love to slay them.
Arggghhhh! we only have fucking 84 orcas left down here now. Five “disappeared” last year. They are finding food impossible to locate. And those fucking, rich bitches on those cruise ships are snapping photos of them starving to death, while they pollute their water with sewage and garbage.
Argggghhh! I quitting now before I really flip out.
Y’all are arguing with the voices in your heads. I never said, nor implied, that whales were actively malevolent towards humans. What I said was that whales do not consider human life sacrosanct: they are absolutely neutral on that. They generally neither hunt them nor protect them.
And yes, Timethief, there have been at least two instances of orcas deliberately killing human beings, although not as far as I know in the wild. Still, they’re orcas, so it counts.