GOODNIGHT, sweet princess of whales, and flights of angelfish sing thee to thy rest. There were many remarkable things about the bottlenose whale’s visit to London but by far the most illuminating was the flood of concern. People lined the towpath for a glimpse. There was permanent helicopter overage of the animal’s adventures on Sky News: it was as if they had opened a Whale Channel. The whale’s tale made every front page.

People cared very much about the whale and were genuinely sad when the whale failed to make it.

Some will scoff at this as sentimentality: mere bunny-hugging. But what’s wrong with hugging a bunny? This is just a philosophical difference, as whether the human duty of care to other species should act only at species level or whether it should extend to the level of the individual.

And the individual in the Thames, haplessly delivering itself into human hands, was a very vivid experience for the entire nation. It was a heartbreaking sight and it told us not only about the individual whale, it also told us about every whale that ever drew breath (and then, a good deal later, expelled it through its blowhole).

The bottlenose whale made herself completely vulnerable, putting herself in a position in which she was entirely dependent on the goodwill and sense of human beings. That is true of every whale in the world.

There are 39 species of whale on the Red List of threatened species, including bowhead whale, blue whale, Arnoux’s beaked whale, North Atlantic right whale and Layard’s beaked whale.

And you thought we had Saved the Whale. Certainly, back in the 1960s during the great Save the Whale campaigns, commercial whaling was brought more or less to a standstill. But now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Japan, Norway and Iceland lead the way; and when the International Whaling Commission meets in May, there are serious dangers that full-scale commercial whaling could be back.

Conservation organisations across the country are lobbying the Government to oppose this. But the tide against the whale is rising once again, as if environmentalism were a 1960s fad no longer to be taken seriously — or as if the whales had been saved for good and all. Alas, conservation is a battle that never ends.

But the will to conserve is immense and strong. When we can see the whale, we certainly care. We need to expand that care to encompass the whales we can’t actually see.

• NOR IS IT just the commercial whaling that gives problems to the great whales of the world. I spoke to Dr Peter Evans, director of Sea Watch Foundation, and heard about the many problems faced by sea monsters in a modern and uncaring world.

  These include fancy new pollutants, climate change (which affects the availability and distribution of the whale’s food) and the huge growth of fishing technology that kills whales by accident on a regular basis.

  And there are more dangers. Sound is a serious problem: the sonic pollution of the seas by military sonar and the seismic work for oil and gas exploration drives whales away and is believed to have a long-term traumatising effect. And as ships get bigger and faster, they kill more whales by the simple means of bumping into them. A great moment, then, to reintroduce commercial whaling.

• THE GREAT monsters are horribly vulnerable. They are subject to human whims, human greed, human need, human fashion. And not just whales. The whale that swam down the Thames and delivered herself into human hands stood not just for the Whale Nation, but for all of wild nature. Everything else in the wild world is as vulnerable as the poor, lost, bewildered and ever-weakening whale.

  But everything is too large a concept for our brains to hold on to. So we celebrated the tale of the lost individual; but we should celebrate her as an emblem of everything else — everything that we are on the brink of losing.

  The hope is to be found in the people on the riverbank, the people who watched Whale Channel and the people who followed the whale’s story in the newspapers. People cared about the whale: ordinary people like you and me. We must find hope in the whale’s despair and cherish everything else that has so incontinently thrown itself on our mercy.