Do the Japanese really love nature more than all other people ?

[Glenn]

The last sentence was highly sarcastic.

You mean the "what's your problem with this?" Yeah, I should have worded that differently.

Btw, it's been a several hundreds years since we have classified whales as mammals and not fish.

Well, a pineapple isn't an apple, and I don't know what grapefruits have to do with grapes, and eggplants certainly aren't grown by planting eggs, nor do they sprout them, yet we use these words all the time.

So Japanese language does not have a term just for "fish". Wonderful !

No, I said 魚 as a radical has a broader meaning. It also means "fish," though (see English "turtle" above). As a character in its own right it means anything belonging to 魚類, which includes jawless fish, bony fish, and cartilaginoid fish.

Even better ! Now Japanese language lacks terms for "mouse" (or "rat" ?) and for "whale".

No, they have them. I think it's highly possible that they use the broad terms for specific creatures, most likely the most common ones, and that they have acquired that meaning over time, but the scientific usage is different. There are words like that in every language.

Perhaps it would be better to say that there should also be the gloss "rodentia" there (or something like that) to give the impression that it's a scientific classification and not just rats and mice. As was written above, ハツカネズミ is "mouse" and ドブネズミ is "rat." As for whales, like I said, I didn't look into that one very deeply, but I see a pattern emerging.

Are you saying that a Japanese weasel is exactly the same animal as a Japanese mink ?

Well, from what I'm looking at now, it appears that way. However, under wikipedia's "mink" heading they don't list Japan at all, so it could be that the people who put イタチ into English had different ideas of what they should call it.

Giraffes, rhinoceros, elephants, lions and tigers aren't native to Japan or Europe, and yet Japanese and European languages have unique words for them. Why not smaller mamals ? I see a lack of interest in distinguishing animal species, and thus a lack of interest in nature. It only takes one person to create new words for the above. This person hasn't been born in Japan yet (or my 2 electronic dictionaries and Wikipedia in Japanese need a serious revision).

In the case of giraffes it's because they had a strange mythological creature called きりん, and when they saw a giraffe they thought it was strange, so they gave it that name (simplified version).

The others I don't know about off-hand, and I don't have time to look them up right now.