Humans should be careful when criticizing other humans about the industrial slaughter of animal species. It is hard to find moral ground.

There was one small, bright spot of global consensus: whales. It took a very long time, but most of the world agreed that these wonderful, sociable mammals, at least, should be granted a stay of extinction. Most of the world, but not all. A few outlying countries continue commercial or dubiously scientific whale hunts, notably Japan, which clings to its whaling ways long past the expiration of any defensible reasons for doing so.

Japanese officials defend the slaughter as a matter of tradition and science. But as Norimitsu Onishi explained recently in The Times, the everyday consumption of whale meat became a national habit in Japan only in the lean years after World War II, when officials of the American occupation promoted it as cheap protein. Japan’s appetite for whale plummeted after the 1960s and never returned, Mr. Onishi reported.

As for the research that Japan insists can be performed only on dead whales, which are then butchered and sold for meat, biologists around the globe dismiss that as a sham.