Traditional Rights To Kill

The Makah claim a right to kill whales because their ancestors did. By that reasoning, modern day descendants of the Aztecs have the right to revive child sacrifice; Americans have the right to revive slavery; and Indonesians have the right to revive head-hunting. The notion that sacrificing a whale would somehow help the Makah’s social ills including drug addiction, poverty and alcoholism is as nutty as thinking yanking the heart out of a child and throwing it into a volcano would work too. Whale sacrifice is an ill-considered distraction from doing something truly useful. Further, there many more Makah today than before the coming of the Europeans. They can’t hunt as they did because they would put far too much pressure on the environment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)