Lets say you are going to a nice restaraunt that serves exotic dishes. You see on the menu Dolphin Steaks:
1 Would you consider ordering it?
1a If not why.
2 Do you have any moral issues with it?
3 Do you have any moral issues with eating ‘regular’ meat?
4 Is there any meat you would have moral issues eating?
For me
1 - Y
1a N/A
2 - N
3 - N
4 - Only human
4 continued, maybe endangered species (unless we want to wipe them out for some reason)
Yes
No
Not at all.
None that I can think of. Panda looks mights tasty, so does California Condor, Blue Whale and Rhino. And if they ever do clone a tasmanian tiger, you better believe it’s feasting time!
I wonder what Cama tastes like?
I remember going to Sea World as a kid and being horrified that dolphin was on the menu of a restaurant there.
At the time I had never heard of dolphin fish. Still wouldn’t eat it by choice. Same as eating gorilla. Kind of the reverse of Jules in Pulp Fiction. The more personality the animal has, the less likely I would eat it.
I think not (Gasp!, something that mangetout won’t eat?)
1a) I don’t like the idea of eating something with which there’s potential for conversation (no oral sex jokes please). Also (and much less significantly) I suspect it would not be good eating, most probably looks like beef but tastes like a mixture of fish and diesel, like whalemeat (is reported to).
Yes, as detailed above (if you call that a moral issue)
Not really.
Answered in 2)(and
[South Park]
KYLE: Dude, dolphins are intelligent and friendly
CARTMAN: Intelligent and friendly on rye bread with some mayonaise.
[/South Park]
First off, you need to clarify the ‘dolphin’. Is it the mammal or the fish?
I would not eat a dolphin (mammal), for the same reason I do not eat rabbits, squirrels, buffalo, giraffe, and the bulk of the other animals on the planet. Some beef (no veal), some chicken, and some fish are ok as long as I didn’t see them loaded onto a truck on the way to slaughter. Cows and chickens wouldn’t do well in the wild if left to multiply without the assistance of humans. I don’t find fish to be particularly personable except for oscars, and I wouldn’t eat an oscar, either.
The question was irresistable.
Assuming they are using “dolphin” as a synonym for “mahi-mahi,”
If “dolphin” as “marine mammal in the whale family,”
No, at least not at the present time. Currently, most dolphin species are not doing too well, and harvesting them for food certainly couldn’t help. If, at some point in the future, dolphin populations increased to numbers where moderate hunting would not be likely to hurt populations, then yes, I would probably order it.
I would have moral issues contributing to the extinction of an animal species by purchasing its meat, and dolphins fall under that category.
No.
As I mentioned before, I try to do my best not to eat endangered species. Thus, I would not, for example, eat tiger, gorilla, shark, etc. I would have no more problem eating dog than eating beef, though. I believe humans are qualitatively different in intelligence than all other animals, and thus the only considerations that would come into play are personal preference, contribution to extinction, and safety / hygiene.
D’oh! I forgot to add, I would not eat human meat, unless it was given voluntarily and in a way that would not harm the giver, e.g. placenta.
Sure, I’d eat it, as long as it wasn’t contributing to the species’ total annihilation.
1 No.
1a I’m a vegetarian.
2 Yes.
3 Yes.
4 All of them.
OUCH
I’d be a little fascinated by its presence on the menu, but I wouldn’t order it.
It’s not a moral issue to me. I like meat. I don’t anthropormorphize the animals I do eat. But I do take comfort in knowing that the animals I eat are fairly stupid and useless. If mankind didn’t eat cows or chickens, there wouldn’t be much practical use for or need to study them. Not so for dolphins.
Aesthetic appeal also goes a long way. Few admire the speed, grace, and fluidity of a turkey (or any other animals we eat).
To answer point 4, I would have trouble eating human meat and anything endangered.
1 Would you consider ordering it?
Sure, I’d try it.
2 Do you have any moral issues with it?
Well, I have some moral issues with eating meat, related to the brain development of the animal in question - I have 0 guilt eating fish, amphibians, most reptiles, very little guilt eating crocodilians and birds, small amount of guilt eating mammals, and quite a bit of guilt eating the more intelligent of the mammals - I would not eat pigs because they are considerably more intelligent than most of our prey animals, but they are just so damn tasty (if pork was just like chicken or beef, I wouldn’t eat it). Dolphin intelligence is comparable to that of a pig - in fact, pigs are probably quite a bit smarter. So I would have a little bit of guilt over eating dolphin, but not enough to not try it.
I answered questions 3 and 4 in my answer above, I see.
Oh, answer 4 - I’d have problems eating human meat if the human was killed for the meat and didn’t deserve it. The fact that it’s human meat isn’t a turn-off for me, I just would not like benefitting from an immoral act (needless killing of a relatively innocent human being). If someone donated their body to a restaurant to be served, hell yeah I’d try some human meat.
I would not eat endangered animal meat if it was poached, I would report the people serving it to the authorities, but there are instances where endangered (or at least ‘threatened’) animals are culled when their local population is too dense, or situations where an endangered animal shows no interest in breeding and is violent towards other members of it’s species, in that case I’d have no trouble eating endangered animal meat.
OK, there are two species commonly known as “Dolphin.”
The Bottle Nosed Dolphin, AKA Flipper, is a mammal and not likely to be on any restaurant’s menu.
The other dolphin is a fish, and is served in many restaurants. It’s usually listed as “mahi-mahi” instead of dolphin, so the guests won’t get grossed out and think Flipper’s being offered for dinner.
I would prefer not to eat any endangered species, but I have no problem eating other kinds of meat.
I don’t think I’d have a “Moral Issue” with eating human, but I’d probably be disgusted and up-chuck if I was forced to eat it. :insert a PUKE smiley here:
I would eat it. I have eaten alligator, snake, and other exotic meats, and would like to try another.
Assuming it was a farm raised dolphin, or one nearing the end of its natural life span, I have no moral issues. I don’t want animals to go extinct, at least the ones which people can eat anyways. The more varieties of meat around, the better. I don’t think dolphins are that intelligent, otherwise they would have learned to stay away from fishing nets by now.
None at all.
Oh, are pigs smarter than dolphins? No problem, then.
I’d certainly want to eat it once, unless there was a significant problem with their population being affected by food harvesting or whatever. And I’m sure it’d be too expensive if I just happened to go into some schmancy restaurant and saw it on the menu.
But I’d want to eat it once.
So:
Yes
Not really
Not enough to stop me
Human, I guess. I mean, it’s all subjective. I feel like I have ‘conversations’ with my cat. I certainly wouldn’t eat him. But generic ‘cat meat’? Well, yeah.
There’s a lot more than one species of dolphin (the mammal).
But I don’t think I could eat any of them. Unless I was very hungery. And had a big bottle of A-1 sauce.
Not much problem with eating meat of any kind, though I would feel some concern about depleting an endangered species.
I had planned to go to Izu to try dolphin (the mammal) after one of their annual autumn hunts, but I just found out that there haven’t been any since 1999 because of animal-rights protests.