Why we care about whales | Marina Keegan 

When the moon gets bored, it kills whales. Blue whales and fin whales and humpback, sperm and orca whales; centrifugal forces don’t discriminate.

Would there be such a commotion if a man washed up on the beach? Yes. But stranded humans don’t roll in with the tide — they hide in the corners and the concrete houses and the plains of exotic countries we’ve never heard of, dying of diseases we can’t pronounce.

In theory I can say that our resources should be concentrated on saving human lives, that our “Save the Whales” T-shirts should read “Save the Starving Ethiopians.” Logically, it’s an easy argument to make. Why do we spend so much time caring about animals? Yes, their welfare is important, but surely that of humans is more so.

Last year a non-profit spent $10,000 transporting a whale to an aquarium in Florida, where it died only three days after arriving. That same$10,000 could have purchased hundreds of thousands of food rations. In theory, this is easy to say.

But looking in the eye of a dying pilot whale at four in the morning, my thoughts were not so philosophical. Four hours until high tide. Keep his skin moist. Just three hours now. There wasn’t time for logic. My rationality had slipped away with the ebbing dance of the waves.

Found in The Opposite of Loneliness .