Al relieves us of pressure to extract stuff from animals

Ambergris is a waxy substance produced by sperm whales to protect their digestive tract from indigestible debris.

- RAHUL MATTHAN

Once expelled, it floats to the surface, washing up as flotsam on beaches around the world. Ambergris also happens to be highly effective at stabilizing volatile perfume notes, significantly extending how long they remain active on human skin. As a result, it became one of the most sought-after substances in the fragrance industry.

As its commercial value grew, demand for this rare biological substance increased to the point where it cost $10,000 per pound. Rather than waiting for chance discoveries of ambergris, whalers began hunting sperm whales, killing a countless number in the process. Since only one in every 100 sperm whales has ambergris, this became one of the most wasteful—and cruel—objectives of the whaling industry.

For centuries, we have extracted rare and exotic compounds from animals for human use. The triumphal robes of victorious Roman generals were dyed in Tyrian purple, a pigment so rare it took 10,000 Mediterranean snails to produce a single gram. When we learnt that diabetes mellitus could be treated with insulin, we extracted this hormone from pig pancreas—killing 23,000 pigs to produce just a single pound.

In retrospect, it is hard to see bio-farming as anything but cruel and wasteful. But it was only after international moratoriums were imposed that trends began to reverse. It's now almost impossible to source natural ambergris for large-scale commercial use and the perfumery industry has turned to synthetic alternatives, just as the medical industry has for insulin.