Why we should let Faroe islanders hunt whales

In Tórshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands, I met a man who first helped his father kill a whale with a sharp knife when he was eight years old. The spouting blood soaked his hair and covered his face like warpaint.  He remembered the warmth on his skin, a contrast to the cold North Atlantic in which they stood.

These days we assume that people who kill whales and dolphins must be bad. Flipper and his cousins are our friends, and notwithstanding that unfortunate business with Moby-Dick, those who pursue whales for their flesh must be terrible human beings. We know now, as Herman Melville did not, that cetaceans are exceptional mammals, highly intelligent with elaborate social networks and close family relationships. They are capable of exhibiting grief and even of coming to the aid of human beings in distress.

In several parts of the world, there are moves to give these special animals legal protection as ‘non-human persons’. India passed that law late last year, and in 2011 the American Association for the Advancement of Science began gathering support for the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans. The first article in that declaration is: ‘Every individual cetacean has the right to life.’

In a week or two, environmental campaigners from Sea Shepherd will be touring Britain enlisting public support to end what they call the ‘barbaric and merciless slaughter of whales and dolphins in the Faroe Islands’. The campaign is gathering rapid traction on social media, and video clips of the Faroese hunt (known as the grindadráp) have been ‘liked’ and circulated in their hundreds of thousands. In those clips, the sea is stained red, the flapping pilot whales are dragged ashore with ropes and grappling hooks, and they are killed with a sharp instrument that severs the spine close to the head, resulting in almost instantaneous death.