| Whale Uses |
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Why were whales hunted? Until the twentieth century whaling was considered to be a perfectly acceptable and indeed admirable occupation. Only with the benefit of hindsight has the industry become to be regarded as cruel and responsible for the near extinction of many of the great whales. As well as providing meat, whale carcasses produced vast quantities of oil for light and lubrication. Whalebone (baleen) was the plastic of its day, and was used for a vast array of products ranging from umbrellas and fishing rods to corset stays and crinolines. Throughout Victorian and Edwardian times, women were so tightly corseted with whalebone that they could not bend to pull on their boots and needed boot hooks to help them do so. That whales had to die painful deaths to provide these products was simply an accepted fact of life in the 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. |
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