[chiuchimu]

I just spent 30 minutes looking around for proof that whales are self aware and I found nothing that proves dolphins are self aware. In fact, it is still disputed among the scientific community on the relevance to intelligence this self-aware tests are. Even the method of using a mirror and observing behavior is a highly questionable method of experimentation. The experiments are inconclusive, yet the people who did the experiments feel the results imply that dolphins have self-awareness. This goes to show you that the very people doing the experiments are bios. Scientist should never interpret results but accept the results as proven or not proven - that's what they taught us was the scientific method in Bio101. It's amazing how some scientist can be bios towards a cause and get away with it.

As clockwork, what does appear a lot on the internet is people using this implied result as an argument against whaling. Some tactfully argue that even if the results only imply self-awareness we should error on the side of caution just in case a future test does confirm awareness in whales. If that is so, then we must all starve since we don't know for sure if any plant or animal is self-aware. Evolution is a continues branching tree. There are no signs saying "This side for self-aware that side for brainless animals".

Next, the only tests I've seen were on dolphins and Beluga whales in captivity. So in the near future, if someone conducts the same mirror test on wild dolphins out at sea and gets different results, this would unarguably destroy the dolphin self-aware theory. More importantly, until such experiment show the same results for captive as well as wild dolphins, this mirror awareness argument carries ZERO weight. A trained lion and a wild lion act differently. I expect the whales will too.

Furthermore, no other whale species other than the two named has been tested as far as I know, so all other whales could be stupid cows of the ocean that don't deserve protection. In other words, as stupid as the aware argument is, it doesn't even apply to all other whales.