Nearly every year, usually during the months of July and August, several hundred pilot whales are killed for their meat and blubber by inhabitants of the Faroe Islands, a small, self-governing territory of Denmark in the far North Atlantic. Since the late 20th century numerous animal-rights, conservation, and environmental groups have condemned the hunt as cruel and unnecessary. The Faroese government has replied that the killing method used in the hunt—the severing of the spinal cord and carotid arteries by knife cuts to the animal’s neck—is actually humane and that the hunt is an integral part of traditional Faroese culture and a valuable source of food for the islands’ inhabitants.

Despite their common name, pilot whales are dolphins, constituting two species of the family Delphinidae of oceanic dolphins. Growing to a length of 4 to 6 metres (13 to 20 feet), they are distinguished by their round, bulging foreheads, their short snouts, and their slender, pointed flippers. Nearly all pilot whales are black. Pilot whales are highly gregarious, living in pods numbering several dozen to more than 200 animals and including extended-family groups. The short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus) generally inhabits warmer waters than the long-finned pilot whale (Globicephala melas). The habitat of G. melas includes nearly the entire North Atlantic, from the eastern coast of Greenland to the western and northern coasts of Scotland and the Shetland Islands.

Trapping, killing, and butchering

The Faroese whale hunt, called the grind, is more than 1,200 years old, dating to the first settlement of the islands by Vikings in about 800 CE. It is a mark of the hunt’s traditional character that the methods used to trap and kill the animals are little different from those developed by the Vikings. When a pod of pilot whales is sighted near the islands or in the channels between them, the men of the local district (only men participate in the hunt) take to their boats to intercept the animals, forming a huge semicircle between them and the open sea. By making loud noises that frighten the whales, the hunters gradually herd them into a small bay or inlet, where they beach themselves or are trapped in the shallow water. There they are slaughtered with traditional knives whose blades are usually 16 to 19 cm (6.3 to 7.5 in) long. Usually two deep cuts are made on either side of the animal’s neck, just behind the blow hole, causing the head to drop forward; a third cut is then made through the middle of the neck down to the carotid arteries and spinal cord, which are severed. After a period of violent thrashing the animal is paralyzed and loses consciousness, dying of blood loss in most cases.

The whales that do not beach themselves or swim to water shallow enough for the hunters to stand in are dragged to shore, often by means of ropes attached to steel hooks that have been plunged into their sides, usually in the area of the head or neck. Because the animals are moving and because their skin is smooth, they often must be stabbed several times before the hooks become secure in their bodies.

The dead animals are lined up on wharves and butchered by hunters and by familes of the district. Each hunter and each family is entitled to an equal portion of the meat and blubber. Although the hunt is officially noncommercial, occasionally some portions are sold to local restaurants and hotels.

Cruelty and food safety

Naturally, the waters in which the whales are slaughtered become red with the animals’ blood—much as do the coves of Taiji, Japan, where each year some 2,500 dolphins are clandestinely stabbed to death (see Dolphin Slaughter in Japan). Even the Faroese government has described the hunt as “a dramatic and bloody sight.” Since the late 20th century, and especially since the advent of the Internet, images of hunters hacking at thrashing whales in a blood-red surf have been widely circulated. The images tend to convey the impression that the hunt is cruel.

This is indeed the chief objection increasingly voiced against the hunt. According to Paul Watson, the founder and leader of the animal-rights organization Sea Shepherd, who has witnessed the killings, the hunters “literally saw through the animal’s spine to kill them. People tend to drink a lot and it’s a big party akin to the Roman gladiator games.” Critics also point out that, in addition to extreme physical pain, the pilot whales also suffer considerable terror as they swim frantically in the blood of their pod mates and struggle against the hunters’ hooks and knives.

Other criticisms of the hunt are that it is unnecessary because it has long been possible to replace the meat and blubber of the pilot whales with other sources of food—the grind is no longer a form of subsistence hunting. (The standard of living in the Faroe Islands is comparable to that of Denmark and other Scandinavian countries.) Indeed, many Faroese abstain from eating pilot whales. Their number has increased since the 1970s, when the Faroese Food and Veterinary Agency declared that the liver and kidneys of pilot whales were unfit for human consumption owing to high concentrations of methyl mercury. In 1998 the agency issued new recommendations based on research that confirmed unsafe levels of methyl mercury, the insecticide DDT, and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a potent carcinogen, in pilot-whale blubber and meat. The agency advised that adults should not eat blubber or meat more than twice a month; women and girls should not eat blubber “until they have given birth to all their children”; pregnant and nursing women should not eat any meat; and women should not eat meat within three months of a planned pregnancy. Finally, in 2008, the chief medical officer of the Faroe Islands declared that no part of any pilot whale was safe for humans to eat. His conclusion was based in part on studies that linked the consumption of pilot whale blubber and meat to neural damage and learning disabilities in Faroese children and to higher incidences of Parkinson’s disease, among other health problems, in Faroese adults. In 2009 the Faroese government issued a statement in which it “noted these conclusions and research findings with concern” and called on the Food and Veterinary Agency to conduct an independent evaluation of the studies. Pending the results of the evaluation, it advised Faroese consumers to continue to observe the 1998 recommendations.

The Faroese government has acknowleded that “the pilot whale hunt … is, by its very nature, a dramatic and bloody sight.” But it insists that the traditional killing method, the severing of the spinal cord and carotid arteries, is more effective and inflicts less suffering on the animals than possible alternatives, including spearing or harpooning and firing a bolt pistol at the brain. (The harpoon, which had been used to herd the whales as well as to kill them, was banned as inhumane in 1986; the spear was banned for the same reason in 1995.) Killing the whales by gunshot is deemed unsafe for groups of hunters standing in shallow water, owing to the violent and unpredictable movements of the animals.

Since the late 1990s ostensibly more humane hooks and knives have been developed. The “blowhole hook,” for example, is a blunt instrument designed to fit in the air sacs behind and on either side of the blowhole. Although critics have claimed that use of the hook produces severe lesions and bleeding in the blowhole and nasal cavities, Faroese veterinary authorities have reported that the hook cannot be inserted into the blowhole itself and that only minimal bleeding results. More recently, a new knife, referred to as a “spinal lance,” was introduced; it supposedly enables the hunter to sever the spinal cord much more quickly than he could with a traditional knife. As of 2009, however, the lance was still in a “testing phase,” according to an independent study of the pilot-whale hunt.

According to the government, the hunt is regularly reviewed by a veterinary monitoring program that employs a conventional statistical measure known as “time to death,” or TTD. A much-cited 1998 report by this program determined the minimum, maximum, and average TTD of 199 whales killed in several hunts in different locations from 1995 to 1998. For the purposes of the study the TTD was defined as the period starting at the moment of the first successful insertion of the traditional or blunt hook to the moment of the severing of the spinal cord with the traditional knife, as indicated by the violent seizures that immediately follow this event. The report found that the average TTD in cases in which the traditional hook was used was 65.4 seconds, with a minimum of 8 seconds and a maximum of 4 minutes and 50 seconds; the average TTD for cases in which the blunt hook was used was 29.2 seconds, with a minimum of 6 seconds and a maximum of 3 minutes and 31 seconds. Critics of the hunt have pointed out that the TTD in this and other official studies does not include the time taken up by unsuccessful attempts to insert the traditional hook in the whale’s body and that the actual moment of the whale’s death or loss of consciousness may occur after the severing of the spinal cord. In the government’s view, TTD statistics such as these demonstrate that the pilot-whale hunts are acceptably humane.

The issue of tradition

The Faroese government and an overwhelming proportion of the Faroese population believe that the pilot-whale hunt should be preserved as an institution of traditional Faroese culture. Criticism of the hunt by foreigners, they maintain, shows disrespect for the Faroese people and amounts to a form of meddling in the territory’s internal affairs. (The Japanese government likewise asserts that the dolphin hunt in Taiji is an element of traditional Japanese “food culture.”) Critics respond that the hunt is a barbaric medieval ritual that, as Paul Watson has said, has no place in the modern world.

On this point the critics are surely correct. It is no justification of an institution that entails great suffering for humans or animals that it is “traditional.” Human slavery, to take an obvious example, was traditional in many societies, including Western ones, until the 18th and 19th centuries—and the fact that it was traditional was used to defend it against the objections of abolitionists. (Defenders of slavery also argued that many people who depended on slavery for their economic well-being, including slave merchants as well as slave owners and their families, would suffer if slavery were abolished.) Equally obvious examples are anti-Semitism, clitorectomy, infanticide, and extreme forms of animal cruelty and abuse. The point is not that a defense of these institutions as traditional would not be accepted today. It is that such a defense should never have been accepted, even in ages when most people regarded the institutions as normal or unobjectionable.

Some advocates of the defense from tradition have held that traditional institutions are important as tangible representations of the values of a society or as a kind of moral “glue” that holds society together. But it is not clear why it should be necessary to preserve an institution that represents corrupt or degenerate values. And although traditional institutions may hold societies together, it is never the case that any single institution accomplishes this feat; so it does not entail the doom of any society to remove or reform that institution. In fact, such reform happens all the time, as the history of any period, the 20th century especially, amply demonstrates. Others say that established cultural institutions provide individuals with a feeling of belonging to a larger group and that this feeling, together with the particular beliefs or values associated with the institution, are an important part of individual identity. Again, however, established but immoral institutions have been reformed or eliminated throughout history without depriving people of their feeling of belonging or seriously impairing their sense of self. Indeed, it is better for people to identify themselves with moral institutions than with immoral ones.

Finally, some uses of the defense from tradition hint at a kind of ethical relativism, according to which no society’s values are better than any other’s, the conclusion being that any moral criticism of a traditional institution from outside the society in which it exists is illegitimate. The obvious problem with this view is that such relativism makes it impossible for outsiders to criticize grossly immoral societies such as Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid. A more fundamental difficulty is that the argument usually offered for ethical relativism is fallacious: from fact that different societies have different values, it simply does not follow that no society’s values are better than any other’s.

There is no good reason why the Faroe Islands whale hunt should continue. It must end now.

—Brian Duignan

Images: Hunters killing a thrashing pilot whale with a knife (fin of the whale visible in the lower right corner)—Andrija Ilicâ—Reuters/Landov.

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