For years, a graphic email petition featuring several stomach-churning photos of dolphins and small whales being slaughtered in an island cove has been making the rounds on the Web with the provocative subject line “SHAME ON DENMARK.”
The email, written in bad English, claims that an annual dolphin drive in the Faroe Islands, an autonomous province of Denmark situated halfway between Scotland and Iceland, is a cruel ritual intended as nothing more than a right of passage for teenage boys on the cusp of adulthood. Urging readers to “Please hit forward and sign,” the campaign also claims that “the dolphin cauldron, like all the other species of dolphins, it’s near extinction.”
The photos included with the email depict a horrific scene of water stained deep red with dolphin blood and young, fit men slashing their throats. ”In this big celebration, nothing is missing for the fun. Everyone is participating in one way or the other, killing or looking at the cruelty ‘supporting like a spectator,’” says the email. If you’ve seen the email (or one of several Facebook pages devoted to the topic), you’ve no doubt recoiled in horror and wondered a) how can something like this actually be happening; and b) what, if anything, is being done to stop it?
Yes, It’s True
Dolphin drives, as anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove now understands, are a means of hunting dolphins by essentially herding them with boats into an enclosed bay where they are then killed one by one with a single slash to the throat, which severs the main artery to the brain. The dolphins are helpless to escape because access to the open ocean is closed off with boats and nets.
However shocking the drives may seem to people who regard dolphins as sentient beings they’d like to swim with and protect, the Faroese hunts present several challenges to conservationists—challenges that can’t be met with a simple email petition.
“It’s an issue that has a lot of nuances that make it difficult to regulate,” said Cheryl McCormick, executive director of the American Cetacean Society, the oldest whale conservation organization in the world. “You’re not going to get politicians to care enough to change policy based on an email that circulates around the globe with nameless faces on a mission.”
The first hurdle is cultural. The hunts are non-commercial indigenous subsistence hunts with a long history dating back to the 9th century. The whale meat and blubber has long been a staple of the Faroese diet: In the 1970s, school doctors would write notes to parents to make sure that blubber was included as part of a nutritious breakfast.
“Because it’s an indigenous subsistence hunt, the meat can’t be sold on the market,” explains McCormick. “Every family gets an allocation of whale meat that is determined ahead of time by the [Faroese] Minister of Fisheries and that dictates the quota. They have twenty-seven whaling districts, and four sanctioned lagoons where the drives are held.”
Not Endangered
The cetaceans killed are actually a combination of long-finned pilot whales, Atlantic white sided dolphins (at left) and bottlenose dolphins (like Flipper). The majority are pilot whales (above, right), which belong to the ocean dolphin family, but are not generally thought of as dolphins because they’re bigger (males are twenty feet and females are sixteen feet), and their behavior is more like that of larger whales.
As those who’ve seen The Cove will remember, a major issue in protecting dolphin species is that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) does not establish regulations on the management of “small cetacean” stocks (such as dolphins and porpoises). Even if it did, the IWC’s ban on commercial whaling makes allowances for indigenous/aboriginal whaling rights. (The IWC is actually weighing a temporary lift of the twenty-four-year-old global ban on commercial whaling for Japan, Norway, and Iceland at its 62nd annual meeting June 21 to 25 in Agadir, Morocco—an initiative headed up by the Bush administration and picked up by Obama’s.)
