The Blue Whale starts with a pastoral cod fishing trip and ends in a gruesome industrial slaughter. The beautifully illustrated out of print 1971 children's book by Kazue Mizumura is surely not appropriate material for whale-loving modern children.

The Dispatch scanned some pieces of the book (we didn't scan the whole book for legal reasons) so that you may also learn that "there are many kinds of whales, and they are useful to man in different ways ... whale meat is used for food - some for people and a lot for pet cats and dogs."

It's so hard to find a good blue whale steak these days - I guess we've come a long way since 1971.