Some things will always remain a mystery, like why whales beach. Several hundreds of them die every year in this manner. It is a noted fact that among those mammals that beach and die, teethed whales, which are actually dolphins, are more in number.
The story of nearly a whole pod of them dying in this manner — as they did on the beaches of Thoothukudi last week — made very sad reading indeed.
About 100 blue finned whales, extraordinarily intelligent creatures, become rudderless followers if the leader’s radar is out of kilter for any reason.
They simply follow the lost leader to the extent of killing themselves on land where they cannot survive although at some point in the evolution of the planet, just as man came to live on land off the sea, the whales went off land to live in the water.
The metaphor their behaviour could stand for is the saddest thing. While reading Jonathan Livingstone Seagull — a homily for self perfection — very early in life brought us a happy tale in a very rich metaphor, the beaching of whales is an extremely tragic one although it is possible to see in their mass deaths their love for their fellow beings runs so deep that they prefer to die with them rather than swim away. Even those helped to move back into deeper waters tend to swim right back in a terrible suicide pact.
There may be a simple truth or a very complicated philosophy in their mass behaviour. Their love for their kin in their pod is so strong as to make apparent a very simple lesson in living together.
But in their ‘follow the leader’ behaviour they are like lemmings falling off a cliff.
Maybe, there is a metaphor here about what happens when something goes wrong in the leader because of a problem in their ambience below the sea.
Much the same is apparent in the way our people behave as their leaders lead even when their radar is so clearly out of order, of which we see too much in India.
There is no reason to analyse this recent beaching phenomenon too much lest we begin blaming ourselves or the environment for the deaths. If we begin seeing traits of human behaviour in animals we are entering the dangerous territory of anthropomorphism. There was a fascinating recent article in
The Guardian on this phenomenon in which an expert — Carl Safina, a biologist and author, sums it up like this in her trenchant analysis.
“Great apes have large brains and complex social lives, wolves live in structured families. But herrings don’t have social structures. So we can’t say all animals are the same. But humans are an extreme example of everything. We are simultaneously the most compassionate and the cruelest animal, the friendliest and most destructive, we experience the most grief and cause the most grief. We are a complicated case.”
Well said, we are extremely complicated and some animals, even in their simplicity, may lead socially richer lives than us.
That is the truth even in this evolved ethos of a few billion years. What we have to learn from this whales beaching experience is despite all our intelligence and so-called sophistication, there is a lot in this world we do not understand. There is no philosophy that can enable us to make sense of such natural tragedies.
However hard we try to rationalise the happenings and remind ourselves that all life on this planet is transient and the planet itself could have a finite life, it does become hard to accept it when we see firsthand here on Earth. Maybe, our intelligence is a curse as much as a blessing.
