Original Article: https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/whale-dolphins-grind/
Over 1,423 white-sided dolphins were killed in the Faroe Islands on 2021, spurning outrage and protest, even among residents who once supported the practice.
Bjarni Mikkelsen, a marine biologist from the Faroe Islands, told the BBC that 2021 saw the largest number of dolphins ever killed on one day in the Faroe Islands, breaking the previous record of 1,200 set in 1940.
Images of the hunt have spread around the world on news sites and social media.
Fishing boats corral whales and dolphins in shallow waters, where hunters kill the animals with spears, clubs and knives.
The fallout from this event alone has convinced the Faroese Ministry of Fisheries to reduce the number of whales and dolphins allowed to be killed in the event to 500, Merco Press reports.
“Aspects of that catch were not satisfactory, in particular the unusually large number of dolphins killed,” the government of the Danish autonomous territory said in a statement.
The annual whale slaughter is known colloquially as “grindadrap,” during which Faroese fishermen drive dolphins and whales into shallow waters, where other hunters kill the animals with spears and knives, according to The Independent.
Within minutes, the waters turn red with blood.
The water in the bay turns red with the blood of slaughtered dolphins and whales.
On average, 1500 dolphins are massacred every year in the Faroe Islands, which invoke an ancestral tradition to justify this barbaric practice, a representative from Sea Shepherds told the Guardian.
“I get nauseous seeing this kind of thing,” said one commentator on the Facebook page of the local broadcaster Kringvarp Føroya, with another describing the massacre as “full-on terrible”, saying: “I’m embarrassed to be Faroese.”
Although the practice of hunting whales and dolphins has been called a 1,000-year-old tradition in the archipelago, the Faroese government has argued the killings take place to provide food for local communities and are fully regulated by law.
The Faroe Islands’ annual whale and dolphin slaughter is known as the grind, or grindarap.
Meat from the butchered whales is typically distributed to participants in the hunt and then given to villages on the southern island of Suðuroy, who save or sell their share of the meat.
The whales are not endangered species and the Faroese government has previously argued that the annual slaughter is sustainable.
“The latest scientific estimate for white-sided dolphins puts the stock at around 80,000 in the seas around the Faroe Islands. Based on this, an annual catch of around 825 white-sided dolphins would be well within sustainable limits,” reads a statement from the Government of the Faroe Islands.
“Blásturongul” is a tool that is put in a whale’s blowhole and used to drag the animal further up to the beach.
“The Faroe Islands are fully committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 14 – to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development,” it added.
In contrast, Lukas Erichsen, a representative of Sea Shepherd, said the new quota was “totally meaningless.”
Erichsen, who is part of Sea Shepherd’s whale defence campaign in the Faroe Islands, told CNNthat the could be no penalty for exceeding the quota.
“Indeed who would be prosecuted or fined should over 500 be killed in the next two years? No doubt if over 500 were killed in a year then those responsible would claim they did not realise that the pod was so big until it was driven into the shallows and the dolphins killed,” he said.
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“This new ‘quota’ is meaningless for dolphins in the long run and has only hastily been announced as a thinly-veiled attempt to deceive both politicians and the press in the face of continued outrage over the killing of dolphins in the Faroe Islands,” Erichsen added.
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Source: The Animal Rescue Site Blog
