“They’re smaller and the amount of meat for the unit isn’t that big, so it’s nothing to consume energy and time,” he said, adding the big death: “In general, it can be said that no one was satisfied with that “.
He said about 265 white-faced dolphins are hunted each year, leaving about 130,000 dolphins in the Northeast Atlantic region. According to the Faroese government, an average of 600 whales are caught each year from a population of about 100,000 on the islands.
Sea Shepherd criticized the hunt for being summoned without proper authority and said participants did not have a license to kill dolphins quickly, as they normally would. The group also said images of the dolphins suggested the animals had been hit by motorboats.
Jens Jensen, a sheriff in the region, said his permit for hunting had been delayed because he had been hiking in the mountains. He said that given the large number of dolphins involved, he had approved the use of knives (which do not require a license) to kill them faster.
On Sunday, the hunters had been looking for whales, Jensen said, and when they saw the pod, they initially thought it was 200 to 300 animals. They decided to drive them to a bay in Skalabotnur, he said, noting that it was difficult to estimate the size of the pods during a hunt.
“When they considered it was over 1,000, they stopped killing the dolphins,” he said.
But critics said that while local meat hunting continues to be the subject of debate among anthropologists, Sunday’s murder was outrageous.
“This atrocity requires our loud voice in protest,” Barbara J. King, anthropologist and professor emeritus of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, he said on Twitter. “This is not a local custom and is not a simple ‘mistake’ of scale. The devastation for #dolphin families is and will be immense.”