It is a great comfort to know that I can go and hang out or hide at Sir Tipene's the next time thousands of my countrymen race out to Farewell Spit and make asses of themselves trying to rescue beached whales.
I do not like the way my countrymen insist beached whales want to be saved, you see. I wonder how they managed to arrive at such a conclusion.
I suspect they arrived at it by thumbing a lift on the bandwagon. I suspect that the "beached whales need me" rhetoric is little more than urban myth.
As such, it does not - ironically enough - show people at their best. Quite the reverse. The beached-whale myth offers believers an excuse for belligerence and righteousness.
Like most urban myths, it offers believers an excuse to not only take the high moral ground but to take it from people who irritate them in everyday life (in this most recent case, Maori on the trail of their indigenous rights; with whaling in general, the Japanese).
Like most urban myths, too, it is defended vigorously and aggressively, the logic being, of course, that it's possible to make up in racket what you lack in facts.
To wit: "Whales beach themselves because they get confused by all the manmade underwater sound," some 15 or 20 people screeched into my poor ear last weekend when I dared to suggest that whale beachings might be natural events. I was absolutely sneered at for not acknowledging the underwater sound factor.
Certainly, I was given no chance to explain that evidence for the underwater sound theory is thin at best. Which it is. As far as I can tell, the underwater sound hypothesis started a couple of years ago when news reports tried to link tests for a Nato underwater sonar system to a whale-beaching somewhere on Greece.
This link still seems a stretch. To believe it, you have to discount the beachings that take place thousands of kilometres from military manoeuvres (the facts are, too, that mass strandings remain rare even in what is, presumably, the underwater-sonar-noise age).
You also have to buy into the notion that manmade sonar sound translates, by remarkable coincidence, directly into whale-speak for "find a beach and die."
Last, but by no means least, you must overlook the fact that most people who write about whale-strandings (I read as many pieces as I could find at the weekend) end by saying that they don't really know what causes the phenomenon. (If you do, feel free to write in.)
So, it follows that to buy into the myth wholeheartedly, you have to be the blinkered type. Certainly, you are not as expansive an individual as you like to think your affection for whales indicates.
If you were, you'd be making more of an effort to save other of Earth's endangered beasts by saving their environment.
Some 11,000 mammals and plants appear in the doomed column on the likes of the World Conservation Union's red list, but nobody seems to give a toss for most of these.
It is, for instance, a while since there was a whip-round at work for the poor old red-arsed colobus monkey. It has been some time since the last international be-in for the Iberian lynx.
And what about sharks?
People are, in the main, rather slow to applaud nature when it comes to sharks. Certainly, people are slow to applaud nature when a shark eats a person. They don't say, "Good on you for exercising your natural imperative, shark. Go forth. Swim. Be free."
Neither do they suggest that any silly sod who goes snorkelling, diving or surfing in shark-infested waters deserves what he gets.
No. They get into a boat, find the shark, kill it and chuck its guts overboard, presumably to remind other sharks who is boss. So much for a give-and-take relationship with nature.
Urban myths. There are plenty around at the moment. They are all ultimately self-serving. I suspect that Beached Whales Need Me is a classic example of this. It's right up there with Silicone Implants Are Bad.
The scary part is that you'll get your head bitten off if you even begin to contradict these myths. People are such nazis.
<i>Dialogue:</i> Save-the-whalers run aground on old urban myths
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