Whaling in the Faroe Islands
The practice dates back to the 9th century, and many Faroe Islanders consider eating whales to be an important part of their history.
Since 1948, the hunt has been regulated by the Faroese authorities, required its participants to be trained, involved modern boats and communications, and been supervised by police.
Internationally, animal rights groups, who consider the hunts cruel and unnecessary, have targeted them with protests, boycotts, and occasional direct interventions.
The evidence for whaling on the Faroe Islands dates back to the early days of Norse settlement (800–900 AD) during the Viking Age.
[1] After 999 AD, when Sigmundur Brestisson brought Christianity to the Faroes, the islanders began keeping records of their whale kills for the purpose of the taxes due to the King of Norway.
[3] The 21st century has seen ongoing regulation alongside a Faroese whaling culture revival both as part of "an international preoccupation with reclaiming, preserving and reconstituting the past" and a national and local "quest for defining identity".
[9] The pilot whales that are not beached were historically stabbed in the blubber with a sharp hook, called a sóknarongul (a kind of gaff), and then pulled ashore.
In 1985, the Faroe Islands outlawed the use of spears (skutil) and harpoons (hvalvákn) in the hunt, as these weapons were considered to be unnecessarily cruel to the whales.
[13] The American Cetacean Society (ACS) has estimated that there may be as many as one million long-finned pilot whales and 200,000 short finned animals.
The entire sea surrounding a whale hunt beaching location tends to turn a bloody red, and this vivid imagery can have a shocking effect on onlookers.
[18] In this regard, the whale hunt is not considered a tourism-friendly practice, as compared to, say, the mattanza tuna fishing process in Sicily and Sardinia.
These include: Bøur, Fámjin, Fuglafjørður, Funningsfjørður, Húsavík, Hvalba (three sites), Hvalvík, Hvannasund, Klaksvík (in both bays), Kollafjørður, Leynar, Miðvágur, Norðragøta, Norðskáli, Sandavágur, Sandur, Syðrugøta, Tjørnuvík, Tórshavn (in Sandagerð), Trongisvágur, Vágur, Vestmanna, Viðvík (near Hvannasund, but on the east coast of Viðoy) and Øravík.
[26] This was nearly five times the average annual catch of this species and roughly double the previous record number of the animals caught in recent decades.
[28] As a result, during the winter months, the Faroe Islanders traditionally eat mostly salted or dried food, including mutton, fish, seabirds and the meat and blubber from sea mammals.
[36] In August 2008, a WHO report summarising much of the prior research noted that the Faroe Islands population was exposed to methyl mercury largely from contaminated pilot whale meat, which contained very high levels of about 2 mg per kg.
[37] In November 2008, Høgni Debes Joensen, the chief medical officer of the Faroe Islands, and scientist Pál Weihe recommended that pilot whales should no longer be considered healthy for human consumption due to the high levels of mercury, PCB and DDT derivatives in the animals.
The research by Joensen and Weihe led to recommendations, but no ruling, by the Faroese government against the consumption of pilot whale meat.
[39] In July 2012, Joensen and Weihe published a follow-up study showed that pilot whales contain an average of twice the EU limit for mercury in food.
In the paper, Weihe also revealed the detrimental impact of ingested mercury from the regular consumption of pilot whales on the foetal development of the human nervous system.
[41] The Faroese generally agree that these health considerations mean whale meat consumption may have to be reduced, and that pregnant mothers should avoid it.
[42] Faroese whaling practices have been challenged by environmental organisations, most notably by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, as being cruel and unnecessary, with critics pointing out that the suffering of the animals is not as limited as claimed.
[43] Reports on the length of time it takes the mammals to die are extremely variable, ranging from a few second to tens of minutes,[44][45] and that is without touching on the psychological suffering that the animals endure as they are herded into the bays and killed in the presence of each other – a point emphasised by Sea Shepherd,[43] which has also noted that the hunts can wipe out an entire whale pod or dolphin family group.
[50] They also point to recent Faroese laws to make the whale hunts more humane and reduce the unnecessary suffering of the animals.
"[52] This notion has been reiterated by other academics, such as in a 2008 paper in Australian Archaeology that said conservationists find Faroese whaling particularly offensive because it does not conform to traditional Western perspectives on "primitive" tribes.
[59] The organisation's campaigning aimed to pressure the Danish Parliament into stopping the whale hunt, and it received some international media coverage.
[63] In 2017, Sea Shepherd followed up on its campaigns by made a legal complaint to the European Commission, delivering a dossier of what it claimed to be evidence showing Denmark had broken EU law by facilitating the slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands.
[64] On 12 September 2021, Faroese whalers slaughtered 1,428 Atlantic white-sided dolphins after herding them into shallow waters at Skálabotnur beach in Eysturoy[65] – a record-breaking mass killing event that drew criticism even from some members of the pro-whaling community, which typically hunts a fraction of that number in an entire year.
[69] On 16 September, the Faroese Prime Minister Bárður á Steig Nielsen pledged an official review of the dolphin hunt amid the outcry and international media attention.
