For me it is because a Whale & Dolphins are mammals and a fish is a fish. Two different things. One is closer to us then the other. BTW, I get upset with Japan's and many other Asian nations ways and how they abuse fish populations. I get bothered when I see how Japanese trowlers sweep the oceans of Sharks and pull them in and cut off their dorsal and anal fins and then dump the body back into the Ocean. They do this so they can have shark fin soup. What a freaking joke.
I also think that Norway and Japan could care less about mammals or Whales or anything but themselves and if there where only 10 left in the world they would see who could kill the last one. 2,000 of one animal in the world is by no means allot. Now if there was 2 million then that would be different. Whales are teetering on extinction and these idiot nations think they are abundant again and want to hunt them down.
I get upset about this the same way I do when people hunt Bear, Tigers, Lions, Elephants, etc. WTH? what is up with that? Just blows me away. I do not respect hunting that is done for anything but for survival. That is how I look at things. I don't believe God created animals so that we as humans could hunt them for sport to see how many heads, rugs etc that we can put in our houses.
Remember the days when Buffalo roamed the prairies of America by the millions? Well, they were gunned down to near extinction by the American Cowboys who thought it fun to target practice while traveling on railroads. Yep, sure is fun to just wantonly kill animals with a rifle.
Some people groups have bizarre appetites and desire to eat bizarre things out of enjoyment. Do they really need to eat Whale? Is their survival linked to Whale blubber, oil, meat? Maybe some eskimo tribes but not folks in Norway or Japan.
That is the issue for me and why I get bothered by it.