The local government of the Faroe Islands on Tuesday defended the death of more than 1,400 dolphins in a single day during a traditional hunt, despite the unrest it raises, even in this Nordic archipelago.
“There is no doubt that cetacean hunting in the Faroe Islands is a dramatic spectacle for those unfamiliar with hunting and killing mammals. However, these hunts are well organized and fully regulated,” a spokesman told AFP. of Torshavn government.
The “grind” or “grindadrap”, an ancestral tradition in the Faroe Islands, a Danish autonomous territory in the North Sea, is to surround, corner with boats a bank of small cetaceans in a bay. So they are within reach of fishermen who have been left on land and killed with knives.
They are usually pilot whales, also called pot heads, but on Sunday there were 1,423 white-winged dolphins, hunting is also allowed. It took place in a fjord near Skala, in the center of the archipelago.
“We don’t have a tradition of hunting these mammals, there are usually a few in the hunt, but we don’t usually kill so many,” explained a local public television journalist KVF, Hallur av Granota.
According to him, a capture of such magnitude had never been made in the archipelago.
The photos in which he sees more than a thousand bloody cetaceans on the beach have generated a lot of criticism.
“It seems quite extreme and it took time to kill them all when it’s usually pretty fast,” added the journalist, who claims that 53% of the archipelago’s population opposes fishing for this species. .
Environmental oenagé Sea Sheperd considers the “grind” a “barbaric practice”, but Faroese authorities argue that it is a sustainable hunting system.
The product of this fishery is not marketed but meat is used.
According to local estimates, there are about 100,000 pot heads in waters around this archipelago of about 50,000 inhabitants.