In the Faroe Islands, emotion after killing 1,400 dolphins

The local government of the Faroe Islands on Tuesday defended the killing of 1,400 dolphins in a single day in a traditional hunt, despite being outraged by the extraordinary amount of carnage even for the northern archipelago.

“Those who are not accustomed to hunting and killing whales in the Faroe Islands are no doubt fascinated by the spectacle.

An ancestral tradition in the Faroe Islands, a lost Danish autonomous region in the North Sea, surrounded by “grind” or “grinddrop”, has a school of small Cetaceans in the Bay. Then they fall into the hands of the fishermen on shore, who kill them with swords.

These are commonly known as pilot dolphins, also known as pilot whales, but on Sunday 1,423 white-headed dolphins also had the authority to hunt, thus fishing in a fjord near the scales in the middle of the archipelago.

“We don’t have a tradition of hunting these mammals, there are usually some on the hunt, but we usually don’t kill a lot of people,” said a local public television reporter. KVF, Hallur Av Rana.

According to him, such an important catch has never happened in the archipelago.

Photos showing more than a thousand bloody cetaceans on the beach have been widely criticized.

“It seems too wild and it usually took a long time to kill all of them when it was very fast,” Mr. Aw Rana added, adding that 53% of the archipelago’s population is opposed to fishing. The pharaohs have no intention of giving up the grind.

According to Pharos officials, the environmental NGO Sea Shepherd described it as a “barbaric practice”, “grind” is a sustainable hunting system.

This fish product is not marketed, but is used for its meat.

According to local estimates, there are about 100,000 pilot whales in the water around the archipelago, which has a population of about 50,000.

In 2020, nearly 600 Cetaceans were killed.