After the kill…Pilot whale hunt, Hvannasund, Faroe Islands. Captions and Photo source: ©© Hans Juul Hansen
Savagery without Borders
Whaling: When the sands turns from white to blood red in the bays of the Faroe Islands.
Excerpts from Animal Health, Wikipedia, Geraldine, and Claire Le Guern
Denmark is involved in a shameful practice. While it may seem incredible, even today a whale slaughtering custom continues, in the Faroe Islands. The sea is stained in red and currently it’s not because of the climate or effects of nature. It is the slaughtering of hundreds of the famous and intelligent Calderon dolphins, which are a type of Pilot whales. An intelligent dolphin that is placid and approaches humans out of friendliness.
This happens every year in Faroe Island in Denmark. In this slaughter the main participants are young teens. This is perceived as a celebration and as a form of social identity and cultural rite of passage for the islanders.
Is it necessary to mention that the dolphin calderon, like all the other species of dolphins, it’s near extinction and they get near men to play and interact.
The Faroe Islands (Faroese: Føroyar, Danish: Færøerne) are an island group situated between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, approximately halfway between Great Britain and Iceland. The Faroe Islands are a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark, along with Denmark proper and Greenland.
Records of drive hunts in the Faroe Islands date back to 1584. It is regulated by Faroese authorities but not by the International Whaling Commission as there are disagreements about the Commission’s legal authority to regulate small cetacean hunts. Hundreds of long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melaena) are killed annually, mainly during the summer.
The hunts, called “grindadráp” in Faroese, are non-commercial and are organized on a community level; anyone can participate.
Some Faroese consider the hunt an important part of their culture and history.They do use the pilot whale carcasses for meat and oil, but perhaps it’s not that important to the people’s food supply if they could get alternative funding or food supplements to replace these stores of whale blubber.
The defense the people take for this ritual is that it is no different from killing a sheep. However, because the times have changed and their own society has become modernized, chance to help them change for the better exist….to be able to progress past this barbarism.
Since 1948, the Faroe Islands have been a self governing region of the Kingdom of Denmark. It has its own parliament and its own flag. It is not, however, a member of the European Union and all trade is governed by special treaties.
This is an utterly distressing, yet quintessential illustration of the human tragedy… which is an insatiable thirst for control and power, rooted in a deep sense of fear and weakness. Violence, here physical ,is the unfortunate and lost path, chosen by so many weak, threaten, ignorant minds, in order to attempt, fallaciously, to reach a place where ” control ” is felt… whatever name is then branded as a socially accepted justification: tradition, culture, rite…
Stop the Calderon Dolphin Slaughter in Denmark- Petition Online
Calderon Dolphin Slaughter in Denmark, Protect The Ocean
Dolphins Escape an Annual Japanese’s Hunt, AFP
Japanese police have launched a probe after nets on holding pens for dolphins in the coastal town of Taiji were cut during an annual hunt, possibly by foreign activists, a press report said Wednesday. Taiji, located on the western Japanese peninsula of Kii, has drawn worldwide attention after a US documentary film, The Cove, which described the slaughter of dolphins there, won an Oscar for best documentary this year. Every year, fishermen in Taiji herd about 2,000 dolphins into a shallow bay, select several dozen for sale to aquariums and marine parks and harpoon the rest for meat…
