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Animal Right Activists protest “pilot whale” massacre

The Faroe Islands, an autonomous province of Denmark, is home to one of the oldest cultural traditions (or so they say!) which involves killing pilot whales. Apparently, this activity takes place annually but is widely accepted amongst the Faroese as it has been a central part of their diet for more than a thousand years.

This whale hunt (known as the “grindadráp”) typically occurs in the summer months, where at least a thousand of these intelligent creatures are herded by the boats-men and are driven towards land where they are beached and killed by cutting the dorsal area all the way to the spinal cord.

The ones that aren’t beached are caught by their blowholes using a hook and dragged on shore to be slaughtered along with the rest of the whales. The gruesome part about this practice (or tradition, if you will) is that it takes the animal anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes to die.

And just recently, several French animal rights activists, supported by the Bridgett Bardot Foundation and Sea World, protested outside the Danish embassy in Paris to demonstrate against this age-old ‘massacre’ of pilot whales (as they called it!) exhorting the Danish government to stop this brutal and cruel practice which provides meat and blubber for households in the Faroe Islands.

Whether or not this practice will be put to an end is anyone’s guess but what is for sure is that animal activists everywhere are waking up to the brutality that goes into making a meal of these harmless dolphins.