Pro-whaling in traditional cultures

Whales are immensely intelligent animals. They are one of the few animals established to possess a "theory of mind", i.e., capacity of modeling the thinking of others and attributing mental beliefs, desires, and intentions to both oneself and others:

http://www.quora.com/Which-animals-have-a-theory-of-mind

Basically, they can link each instance of a mental states sequentially and continuously in their thought (i.e., called metarepresentation). They do not experience mental states "at isolated points of disparate events" unlike other animals. Given the research, it is not crazy to claim they have narrative structures and suffer greatly.

However, this film seemed to depict it as fine for Inuits to kill and eat these animals because it has been in their culture for a long time. What led me to deduce this are two things: we actually see a whale be killed and eaten by tribal people, the main protagonist is given a whale teeth as a souvenir, and one of the main characters says our ways threaten them. For some odd reason, the film criticizes poaching of polar bears, but it seems to have no problem with whales being "sustainably" killed regardless of their remarkable intelligence and self-awareness.

I did not like this film because it deals with such a controversial topic in a dismissive manner.