The following is a letter to mankind from a whale. Its more than the story of a whale's life, its the history of its family and its species.

Please take the time to read it completly. It will change you forever and it will give you a glimpse into a world you could never imagine.

Humans,

I have wanted to communicate to you many times but our languages are far apart. Many of you may think that my kind and I are unable to communicate in any but the basest of ways, but you would be wrong. We have had communication at a level equal to yours or higher since before you were out of the trees. Our culture is different though, very different and that has enabled you, in error to arrive at the idea that we are incapable of thought, emotion and self-awareness.

Let me begin at the beginning though, because its important that you know the whole story. It may not be long before both our story and our species is lost forever and only through turning to you do we have a chance of having our story not end in obliteration. Please be patient with me for there is so much to tell and so little time to tell it in.

I am going to start at the present and how we are thought of. For you to understand our world you must first understand where we came from and how long we have been here. Our ancestors have cruised the oceans for millions of years.

When you were descending from trees and knew nothing of fire or the wheel we had mastered language and had passed our history and its lessons down to each generation with stories and songs for thousands of years. We knew each others names and had learned to talk across thousands of miles while you still were limited to grunts and shouts between trees. Our cerebral cortex developed spindle cells, the cells that allow beings to have cognitive processes such as self-awareness 15 million years before humans.

You humans prize yourselves on your superior intelligence and we are surprised you can even function as you are missing an entire brain lobe. Humans have three brain lobes and whales have four. It is this lack of a forth lobe which, at least to us, has made you so dangerous to yourself and to other species. You have a certain level of ability to think destructively without the support of the forth lobe, to give you the ability to know the consequences of your actions.

This missing ability to judge consequences has been evident in your species for thousands of years. In your murdering of other species to the point of extinction, in your poisoning of your own air and water as well as ours and of course the wholesale murder of your own species. The examples of your inability to think go on and on but as you have only three lobes there is no point in belaboring it.

To the extent that you are missing this very important lobe humans have always felt they are “missing” something important (which in truth they are) and have turned to many types of religion and other beliefs to fill this void. In doing so you have bolstered yourselves with self-aggrandizement and arrogance convincing yourselves that you are indeed superior to all other organisms on the planet. You have based this false idea on your ability to develop technology without realizing that your dependence on technology to simply survive indicates a lack of intelligence rather than an abundance.

One of the things that you humans are very good at is defining the criteria by which you judge others, especially other species. Because you are capable of producing technology you consider yourselves more intelligent than a species that does not produce technology. But consider this. Would not a species intelligent enough to survive easily without technology, a species having language, story, song, creativeness and love, a species without war, or the need to destroy other species and themselves be more intelligent than one who would die without technology and who is a master only at destruction.

Would you not, even as a human, consider someone that pointed a gun at themselves believing nothing would happen as they pulled the trigger a person of less intelligence? Is this not exactly what you humans have been doing throughout the time you have occupied the land. Did you not destroy all the trees on Easter Island and then wonder what you would do. Have you not poisoned the air and water and then wondered why you are getting sick and dying?

Do you not use lethal radioactive bullets to shoot each other and then wonder why your own people are dying of radiation poisoning? When you speak of intelligence if you were not so dangerous we would laugh until the seas shook.

But you are dangerous. We lived in peace with all other species, yes we ate but all species eat, but we did not kill just for killing, that would be stupid and we are not stupid, we only lack technology. You have technology instead of intelligence and as such you are dangerous, both to yourself and to us and every other species on this planet.

You allow other people to do terrible things to us and to other species. I would like to not have to tell you what has happened to us at your hands but that is part of our story too.

You speak of intelligence and humanity. I want you to stop for a moment and consider that our history has been destroyed by you. You have murdered our grandfathers and grandmothers, those entrusted with the history of our kind before they could pass on the secrets and songs and stories of our past. You have deprived us of our customs and our culture by murdering millions of our families.

With your poorly developed brains you are incapable of feeling directly the pain of another. But we are not. When your kind drag one of our family onto the beach and cut his or her throat we not only hear our loved one’s screams, we are connected to them in a way you humans will never understand because you lack the intelligence. We are connected to them in a way that we actually feel the feelings they fell. When you murder one of us you murder us all and we all feel it and we all know the feeling of terror and death.

Like us you are male and female. I am a male but I understand the feelings of a female. Can you imagine the sound your wife would make as her throat was cut and the messages she would send to you, her husband, to save her child? Can you imagine the feelings of knowing you can’t nurse the child and it too will die?

I know that you find the whole idea of intelligence difficult to think about. Your ego is so intransigent and dogmatic that it refuses to believe anything that belittles it. There is much evidence to support this. For thousands of years your people were convinced that everything revolved around the earth, the sun the planets, the universe. Men and women were put to death for daring to even whisper that it might be possible that the earth revolves around the sun. Your species excels at a lack of intelligence, but as I said we know its because of your lack of a forth brain lobe. Its not your fault and we don’t blame you for your lack of intelligence. But we do blame you for the murder of our families and our planet.

I would tell you more about our history but I am unable, for as I said much of our history is gone now, destroyed by your hand. Our stories of life before humans are only fragments of what we once knew. Our storytellers are dead and their children are dead. There were times when the sea was alive with our stories. We would swim and listen to the tales of our ancestors broadcast thousands of miles, much like you would use radio, but we used our brains. And now the seas are silent of our stories. Instead far too many of our broadcasts are of attacks and filled with screams and the dying sobs of our loved ones.

And when there is no scream to fill the ocean the void is filled with the terrible hissing of your low level sonar. It hurts our ears and makes it hard to find our way. I have heard that you humans use the same type of thing on each other when you broadcast loud music day and night into an area to drive people out of hiding. But for us there is no place to go and no escape from the sound. It is relentless and has driven some of us to suicide, something that no whale would have considered possible two hundred years ago.

We had stories of our discoveries of great importance, stories of how we had learned to see inside each other. Probably you didn’t know that we could see within each other. We can see the bones and muscles and fibers of each of our bodies by using sound, what you call sonor. This makes it more heartbreaking when you attack us. We not only hear our loved ones scream, and feel their emotion and death, but we see their helpless bodies destroyed by your knives and harpoons and we watch as their bones break and their lungs fill with blood, unable to help or run because it is not our way to abandon another in their moment of death. No one should die alone, even if it means our own death.

Your species is not like this though, we have watched you abandon and leave your kind to die alone. How you can do this and call yourself intelligent and caring is beyond us.

I will try to write again some time in the future if I am still alive. I am going to the South soon, into what you call the “Whale Sanctuary” but I know you will be hunting us there. You have hunted us there for years with your harpoons and guns. It used to be a place of joy and fun before your technology allowed you to follow us and kills us there. We would laugh and sing our songs under the stars as the waves washed over us. Now we go only because there is food. Your kind has robbed the oceans of most of our food and so even though we know the dangers we must return there if we are to live.

With hope for the future I leave you with no bad feelings, only the desire that you will one day mature into a species with intelligence enough to communicate rather than kill.

One of the last whales left.