The Cove, in its own right

Since watching this year's Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, I've meant to write it up and recommend it as must-see for its exposure of the atrocity of Japan's annual deliberate slaughter of thousands of dolphins, whose extremely highly mercury-contaminated flesh is sold to unsuspecting consumers.
    The reason for the high level of mercury contamination is that dolphins eat at a very high level on the oceanic food chain, and humans have put a lot of mercury into the oceans. Very few people in Japan know what's happening in the hidden cove. The men engaged in the enterprise, though they claim to think it's okay, have gone to great lengths to try to keep observers (especially observers with cameras) out of the area. The film crew's accomplishment in producing The Cove is astonishing. The story is riveting. The Cove was directed by Louie Psihoyos, and features Ric O'Barry, who trained the dolphins in the TV series, Flipper, and rues the outcome.
    But the film shocked me, and I'm still shocked, apparently to the point (until last Saturday) of not being able to say anything, or knowing what to say. The stupid, wanton destruction of even one (let alone thousands annually) of nature's intelligent creatures....

I'm still morally stunned, by The Cove more than by the films about World War II that I mentioned on Saturday. I've become desensitized to what happens in a war, but the intentional slaughter of friendly, well-loved dolphins for monetary gain is beyond me.
    The wanton destruction of even one (let alone thousands and millions and tens of millions) of nature's intelligent creatures (from dolphins and other intelligent non-human creatures to other humans) is brutal because the perpetrators are (at least in theory) capable of morality.
    That is, though "brute" originally referred to a beast, or non-human, it has come to refer to a savage or "inhuman" human, which is a nice paradox, come to think of it. Humans are (in theory) capable of being human, but we're so often [morally] inhuman.
    As for the original, non-human brutes, can we fault them for devouring the animals lower than they on the food chain? I don't think so. The food chain (below the human level) is amoral and therefore not itself [morally] brutal, but if "God" created it, then isn't God Himself brutal—that is, a brute? Absent God, the brutes of nature are the human ones who exercise their inhumanity.