Whale hunting in the Faroe Islands has been a yearly tradition going back hundreds of years and a recent group of volunteers posed as tourists in order to document the horrific event.
Pilot whales and dolphins traveling in pods that pass by the Faroe Islands are herded by small motor boats towards the shore until a hook can be placed through the blow hole in order to then drag the animals onto shore where there spinal cords are snapped. The entire event lasts around three months and results in the slaughter of hundreds to thousands of whales depending on the year to year fluctuations. Animal activists and ocean conservation groups have been attempting to bring awareness to this horrific crime on a global scale in order to increase the demand that this ritual be discontinued immediately.
Gruesome pictures given to Fox News show the mass slaughter of whales and dolphins in a series of hunts in the waters around the Faroe Islands this summer.
The pictures were taken by volunteers from the ocean conservation group Sea Shepherd Global posing as tourists on the Faroe Islands, a Danish archipelago halfway between Norway and Iceland.
The group told Fox News that its volunteers participated in “covert land-based patrols” to document the hunts, which are legal in Denmark, over a 10-week period from July to early September this year.
Sea Shepherd Global said that its volunteers documented nine separate hunts, which are known as grindadrap in the local Faroese language. The nine hunts accounted for the deaths of 198 Atlantic white-sided dolphins and 436 pilot whales, according to the conservation group.
An unnamed eyewitness account described a hunt at the village of Bour on Aug. 31, where 29 long-finned pilot whales were reportedly killed. “We recorded children attempting to remove the teeth of several whales with nothing more than a pocket knife as well as removing slices of what appeared to be a tumour on one whale,” said the Sea Shepherd volunteer in a statement.
The entire event is barbaric and should not be allowed to occur on such a monumental scale. While the hunts are intended to supply food for the Islands, and hunting shouldn’t be outlawed when it come from a place of necessity but there’s no way that it’s necessary to slaughter that many whales. Period.