I see nothing wrong with sustainably farming whales like any other animal. Certain species have been endangered and those should be protected, but responsible consumption of traditional foods is an important way to preserve culture.
Although the article quotes a hunter claiming their village has done it for 400 years, it also later says “A number of coastal communities in Japan have hunted whales for centuries but consumption only became widespread after World War Two when other food was scarce.”
Also, whales aren’t being farmed, they’re just being hunted.
It's a question of whether argument-from-tradition is a valid argument for continuing a practice. For relatively new "traditions", it's not. You need other reasons.
If people want to do something that's a tradition and is totally harmless, that's fine, but then it shouldn't need any protection. You only need "protection" because there's some reason the tradition can't continue without it.
At the moment, there's very little we can tell about the exact make up of their intelligence.
Imagine, with your current intelligence, growing up in a world where you can move in three dimensions which has poor visibility but carries sounds very well. There are no fixed spots, so there is no "here". You also have no opposable thumbs, so you will never create tools or written records.
Now imagine that evolving over eons and generation upon generation: you might end up with a world view, a culture, and thought process that is complete alien.
What we observe as whale-songs might simply be them re-telling their Edda in an Ent-like fashion. We might be inadvertently hunting members of a species that is intellectually equal to ours, but too alien to understand.
It's not impossible that some animals besides humans could be capable of moral reasoning at that level. On the flip side, let's hope intelligent life forms from an environment totally alien to us never arrive here and get a taste for human flesh...
I wonder what the humpbacks have against orcas.
>let's hope intelligent life forms from an environment totally alien to us never arrive here and get a taste for human flesh...
If they have a book with the title "To Serve Man", run for the hills.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...
My father grew up in northern Illinois (where I was born and lived until a teen) and bemoaned the tearing down of the confederate monuments in the south, to which I rolled my eyes. Meanwhile parents strongly celebrated a Scottish heritage generations removed and comprising about 10% of my actual ancestors.
Cultures change. They evolve. They eat themselves, absorb other cultures, and sometimes fade from existence. It's all as important as you want it to be.
That said, if your culture needs to kill whales for funsies, I'm going to go ahead and personally say your culture isn't something I support and would prefer went away.
Japan has never cared about sustainable whale-hunting before.