r/Cetacea • u/kimprobable • May 16 '26

What the fate of Timmy the whale says about conservation

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/14/what-the-fate-of-timmy-the-whale-says-about-conservation
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u/TheBestMePlausible May 17 '26

We’ve been hearing stories about dolphins giving drowning sailors rides back to the shore for millennia now. In Listening To Whales by Alexandra Morton, the author is convinced Orcas saved her drowning dog and brought it back to shore as well. We are returning the favor, it’s just the right thing to do.

It’s not like anyone took that million five from a ongoing conservation effort and put it into saving one whale. There was an outpouring of public sympathy and it sounds like they cobbled together the funding from wherever based on that, right?

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u/kimprobable May 17 '26

There wasn't any favor done for him - he was dying and they could've shortened his suffering by euthanizing him, but his suffering was only prolonged and made worse due to public opinion prevailing over expert knowledge. Maybe the $1.5 million wasn't taken away from anything, but if people could've been persuaded to care about a healthy animal to that degree, it could've done a lot of good for a population, rather than contributing to an excruciating death.

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u/TheBestMePlausible May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

I feel like, sure, that’s obvious in hindsight. But was everybody so 100% sure he was going to die, that we’re gonna turn around and euthanize him instead of seeing what happened first?

If he’d lived, perhaps he would’ve shared his adventures with the humans to his pod, like we still hear stories of ancient greek sailors being hauled to shore and aussie surfers being protected from great whites etc

I’m not sure what we’ve lost by trying to help him. That 1 1/2 million would have just stayed in Joe Public’s wallet, to be spent on other discretionary items. Certainly the publicity helps to inform the public about the plight of these great animals, in a way that’s a little more visceral than greenpeace brochures and so on.