Analysis Of Marina Keegan's 'Why We Care About Whales'

Have you seen beached whales? These massive creatures strand themselves on the beach, alone or in a group, the whims of the moon’s tidal forces. Sometimes, a single whale trapped by the moon’s pull calls in distress, drawing the sympathy of the whole pod, a case of symphony dooming the whole community stranded on the beach to a slow death. In “Why we care about whales”, Marina Keegan writes about witnessing fifty or so stranded pilot whales “lying along the stretch of beach in front of her house, surrounded by frenzied neighbors and animal activists” (35,36). Like the others, she jumped in to help—a futile task which finally led to “23 pairs of whale eyes glazed over” (32,33). Keegan suggests that despite the logic that human welfares are more important than animals’, emotions of compassion towards animals blind us from(better words) feeling the fragility of human suffering near or far away from us. She herself couldn’t think philosophically in the present of dying whales. The ambiguity of her thoughts reveals the paradox between logic and emotion. (unfinished)
 Human try to control all the things; however, there are

still things that human cannot manipulate—nature. Natural forces don’t discriminate, whether human or animals. Starting with “when the moon gets bored, it kills whales.” (1), Keegan reflect the cruelty nature draw upon these lovely creatures. She then describes whales’ seemingly foolish action to fight the nature and their incapacity to help themselves as “They try to fight the waves, but they can’t fight the moon. They can’t fight the bathymetry of oceans or the inevitability that sometimes things just don’t work out.”(8-12), which makes them extremely innocent and helpless. The vulnerability—whether a human or an animal--naturally triggers our compassion and empathy. (better connection) By writing “There is no echolocation on the land…the Ethiopian aren’t fine” (114-117), Keegan indicates that human cannot feel the whales’ struggle and pain at this moment, the same way as we cannot know the feelings of these homeless people and Ethiopians hiding in the corner of our society. But the unknowability should not preclude us from trying to understand and act. Humans sometimes are unable to control the forces, the moon, the gravity, the Mexican earthquake, the Hurricane Harvey, the political leader or the accidents in our life. Facing these cruelties, humans are equally indefensible as other species on the earth. But what we could control is to help other human and animals relieve their pain and suffering even if we fail to save them. If we could help, we are able to help, we probably should help.
 According to Keegan, human’s emotion always defies logic when we witness the vulnerability of animals and human. She made a “logical” argument that we should care more about human than animals; however, when “looking in the eye of a dying pilot whale at four in the morning” (94), her thoughts swing from logic to emotion, and compassion overwhelms her eventually. “There wasn’t time for logic. My rationality had slipped away with the ebbing dance of waves.” (96,97) Before trying to judge her action or compassion, we probably should rethink about how we define and build up our logic and emotion towards nature and other species. Under our logic, Keegan indicates that “their [animals’] welfare is important, but surely that of human is more so.” (88,89) In this way, we tend to logically place ourselves above other animals and nature in utility value, but forget we are part of nature. Prioritizing our welfare above nature makes us extremely self-centered, also jeopardizing our future. By denying and diminishing other animals’ cognition, emotions and communication, we separate them from us and treat them as our adjunct and property. For example, though the earth itself shows its cruelty to the whales, human destruction also plays a significant role in mass stranded whales—human-generated noise. Military sonars disturb the echolocation of the whales in some cases, causing the whales strand on the beach. While we are destructing other animals and the earth, we are also destroy ourselves.  Keegan forces us to reflect on the fact that these whales, seem unrelated to our life, are tightly bond with our fate.                  (a lot to say)
 Keegan also points out the poignant truth that humans are not so altruistic as we regard ourselves. “I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans.”, She describes her concern for humans’ indifference towards our siblings(65). Human victims, unlike vulnerable whales lying in front of us, are less tangible, more stickier, and more complicated. Take the homeless people as an example. When we walk pass the homeless people on the road, sometimes we help, sometimes we just pretend not seeing them. The reason that we choose not to help varies: Maybe we are just in a bad financial aid, maybe we are afraid getting entangled by them, or we
 So where does this strange impulse come from?

In “Don’t anthropomorphize inky the octopus”, Jacob Brogan offer an answer to us—anthropomorphism. That is, human tend to interpret animals by “turning them into distorted mirrors of our own experience and expectation” (Don’t, 23,24). The escape of the octopus, Broman illustrates, is anthropomorphized by the human as “breaking out of animal aquarium”, “reminiscent of Finding Nemo”, “a magician like Houdini” for our own plights. We don’t want to know and care what exactly how octopus thinks and how he finds the way to escape; we focus on how to reflect our willingness on their behaviors. Instead of anthropomorphizing them in human terms, Brogan logically demonstrates, we should understand these creatures by their own cognition, their emotion, their complexity even if they are different than us in some

way.
 Moreover, anthropomorphism makes human resonate more with the species that shows the similarities to human. Like Keegan mentioned in her essay “Perhaps the whales’ sheer immensity fosters empathy…they give birth, for god’s sake.” (57,62) Whales are more like human, they feel “cohesion, a sense of community, of loyalty” (Why,14,15) Their resemblance of human traits helps us to imagine their suffering and therefore generate the sympathy to help. In some extent, anthropomorphizing the whales facilitates us to echo with these species. Then the next puzzle comes into our mind: If we can’t interpret other animals in human terms then we can’t relate to them and care about them, but if we only anthropomorphize them, we won’t appreciate what makes them different. These ideas provide a paradox between our logic--“it is wrong to anthropomorphize animals” and our emotion—compassion, sympathy, love, empathy, etc. Why do we frequently anthropomorphize animals? Maybe it is too difficult to separate our logic and our emotion when we interpret the world. Since we are humans, we only know the feeling to be human. Therefore, when we try to understand other animals’ behaviors, we assume the feeling means the same thing for these species even if it really doesn’t. In fact, the way we interpret existing thing based on our own standard also reveals our egoism towards nature. Just like Alan walker has ever said “The animals of the world exists for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for man.”
 Maybe we should admit that animals are like us and we are not superior to other species on the earth. Since we share the same ancestor, the same environment, and part of the evolutionary history, it is reasonable that we share some same characteristic with other species on the earth. Human and animals just evolved in different and unique paths, but with the same origins. In the past, we diminish other animals’ ability to use tools, to communicate and deny that they do not have the cognition to convince the superiority of ourselves. But more researchers and studies prove that animals can communicate, use tools, experience pain, grief, compassion, happy and make plans and decision more than we could imagine. For instance, Brogan suggests, though octopus “presumably aren’t conscious in the way that humans are” (Don’t, 86), “they are simply intelligent in a qualitatively different way than we are.” (Don’t, 87). Their complex nonvisual sensory, extra-cranial complexity, attitudes and orientation, though dissimilar to the conventional human standards, also show their unique intelligence to achieve thousands of motions and perceive the world. Likewise, whales have sophisticated brain size which human still could not fully understand and remarkable way to communicate underwater—echolocation. What truly surprise human is that whales could sacrifice themselves due to their compassion for each other, which Keegan writes as “a fatal symphony of echolocation” (Why,16). Comparing to humans’ conditional compassion, whales tend to behave more altruistic when they encounter the vulnerability of one--whether whales or other marine animals.