Cetaceans should have the same rights as humans

As a human, I am born with certain inhalable rights, according the United Nations. The right to life, freedom from torture, freedom from slavery or servitude, the right to seek a safe place to live and the right to freely participate in the life of the community. With the discovery that killer whales can mimic human speech, it’s about time these five rights were extended to cetaceans.

If whales, dolphins and porpoises had these rights, humans would be violating every day. Parks like SeaWorld enslave cetaceans en masse, industrial scale whaling occurs in Japan, dolphins are killed in huge fishing nets and mankind is dumping thousands of tons of plastic into their ocean home.

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Why, you ask, should cetaceans be entitled to human rights? The age-old argument is that humans are more intelligent than animals. But research has shown this is not the case. All the characteristics which supposedly set humans apart from animals, are present in cetaceans. Dolphins have complex language systems, comparable to that of humans, according to a Russian study. Other research has shown that whales have complex, developed brains, similar in size to body ratio to that of humans. The same study showed that cetaceans “live in large complex groups with highly differentiated relationships that include long-term bonds, higher-order alliances, and cooperative networks [61–62] that rely on learning and memory”. Society, in other words.

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It is true, whales and dolphins will never build the Empire State Building or land a rocket on the moon. Opposable thumbs are a wonderful thing. But arguments against basic cetacean rights falls at the following hurdle. Hunter gatherers in the Amazon basin have no complex cities, speak a language we don’t understand and hunt for food yet have the same intelligence as a city dweller from London. Does that lack of “civilisation” mean we can hunt, enslave them and pollute their environment? Of course not. Why should this be any different with cetaceans?