An age old Scandinavian ritual, turning the sea blood red, is causing controversy
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Animal rights campaigners are actively trying to end the yearly hunt.
A centuries-old tradition of slaughtering whales in the Faroe Islands (which has yet to be made illegal) has caused outrage and led to heavy criticism by animal rights protesters. The annual ritual involves trapping whales (that swim close to the shore) using their boats and forcing them up onto the beach. Once there, the animals are subsequently slaughtered. The entire process is known to locals as ‘grindadrap’, and many of them volunteer to help acquire the whales.
The prominent animal rights activist ‘PETA’ recently began a campaign and petition against the continuation of the ritual, detailing its gory stages of the process. “Metal hooks are driven into the stranded mammals’ blowholes before their spines are cut. The animals slowly bleed to death. Whole families are slaughtered, and some whales swim around in their family members’ blood for hours.” The campaign goes on to explain how (as whales exist as mammals, alike humans) whales aren’t too somatically dissimilar to their human counterparts, “whales [and dolphins] are highly intelligent creatures and feel pain and fear every bit as much as we do.”
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‘PETA’ further stress concerns for the overall population of long-finned and short-finned pilot whales. Despite not being endangered species, they argue that continuing this and any other similar traditions could lead to significant population reduction.
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