Rome, 11 July 2022 – There will still be one slaughter of whales in the Faroe Islands, but this year it will be “limited to a maximum of 500 units”. The controversy rekindles – and indeed risks aggravating it – the latest communication from the government of the Faroe Islands about the controversial hunting cetaceans traditionally organized in late summer by local fishermen. The Danish Autonomous Territory in the North Sea has informed that the killing of cetaceans, in particular dolphins, will be limited to one maximum of 500 specimens per yearafter the storm for the culling in September of last year of 1,423 animalsmostly white-tailed dolphins.
The BBC reported, underlining that the decision was taken after thewave of protests followed by the massacre of 2021 whose photos of the cetacean carcasses floating in a sea turned red with blood they went around the world. The hunt for marine mammals is one tradition practiced for hundreds of years on the remote Faroe Islands. But the scale of the killings last year, with over a thousand whales killed in just one dayalso shocked many local people involved in the practice, as well as aroused strong criticism all over the world, and one was presented to the local government petition which he collected almost 1.3 million signatures to stop the slaughter.
The archipelago government acknowledged that the number of cetaceans culled last year was “unusually high”, a figure that “is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term“. In the Faroese tradition, hunters surround the cetaceans with a large semicircle of fishing boats and lead them in a shallow bay where the animals run aground. The fishermen on the shore then kill the cetaceans with knives.
Every summer the pictures of this bloody hunt go around the world and baffle animal rights activists, who see the practice as barbaric. However, the tradition still enjoys wide acceptance among the inhabitants of the islands, who emphasize that dolphins have fed the local population for centuries. The government has stressed that the cetaceans captured constitute an “important supplement to the sustenance of the population of the Faroe Islands “and while staring at a provisional limit of 500 head per year, he noted that even an annual quota of around 825 dolphins would be “well below sustainable limits.”
After the opinion of the scientific committee of the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, expected in 2024, the authorities of the Faroe Islands they will re-examine the roof. The government has also assured that it will look into the procedures used to kill the captured cetaceans.