September 15, 2005

‘I had come to accept that this way was the best’

Reporting by Sue Kwon

It was a shock seeing the whale killed.

I had expected the sound of the explosives to be loud, but I hadn’t expected to feel the force of the blast.

When the smoke cleared, there was a crater in its head, and the whale I had watched for hours, had heard breathing and had watched flapping its fluke, lay still.

As its lifeblood ran out, the waves around it turned crimson.

“Ag no shame man!” said one of the many bystanders at Mnandi beach near Strandfontein. “Why didn’t they tow it out to sea?” said another.

I knew how they felt. Eighteen hours earlier, I would probably have made the same comments.

No one knows exactly why the Southern Right whale beached itself at Mnandi Beach on Tuesday afternoon. Reports came in that people were jumping on its back and the authorities went out to investigate. It was lying in shallow water, stuck on the sand.

Some said it may have been ill, others that it had come too close inshore and got stuck, yet others that it might have had something wrong with its navigation system.

They tried everything to get it back into deep water.

On Tuesday night, I watched teams from the National Sea Rescue Institute, the police, Table Mountain National Park, Marine and Coastal Management and members of the public, try to get the whale turned around and push it out to sea.

As I watched them struggling in the surf, I was willing them to succeed.

With bright spotlights cutting through the night, shining on the surf and the glossy blackness of the whale, I thought of the animal making its long journey from the Antarctic to our coast every year.

It had probably been born here some years before, possibly even in False Bay. I thought of its long return voyage at the start of summer, all those thousands of miles back to the Southern Ocean. Of its parents mating, the long gestation period before it was born, it suckling from its mother in the shallows.

Now it lay dead on a False Bay beach, a hole blown in its head by explosives.

During those 18 hours from when I first watched the people try to rescue the whale, I had come to accept that killing it this way was probably the best. Not for us humans, perhaps, concerned with how bad it made us feel, but for the whale, certainly.

It was clear from watching scores of people battle for hours that they were never going to refloat the 10m animal, weighing over 11 tons.

If a boat powerful enough to pull the deadweight had managed to tow it out to sea, the whale scientists on the scene said the force on its tail would undoubtedly have dislocated its spine. It would have died slowly and painfully.

That left a choice: letting the animal die naturally, or killing it. It was already suffering, its breathing erratic. It could have taken days to die, slowly baking in the sun. Its ribs, not designed to bear its own body weight on land, offered little protection for its internal organs, and it would have suffered slow organ failure.

And the people. As many as there were who felt sorry for the creature, so too were there those that had jumped on it, prodded it, and dozens who had posed grinning in front of the distressed animal while they had their snaps taken.

Killing it had to be the humane choice. Shooting it was not an option.

Even with a powerful weapon, experience in other countries had shown it was extremely difficult to get a clean brain shot, and there have been instances where whales had been shot over and over again before they finally died.

Drugs? The amount needed would be enormous, and it would be ineffective injected into the blubber.

They would have to get it into a blood vessel, which would probably entail cutting the animal to find one.

Blowing it up sounds ghastly, but death was instant.

The police bomb unit used a cone-pack explosive, designed to direct the force of the blast in one direction. They placed the explosive behind the whale’s blowhole, put a sandbag on top , and detonated it. It was over in seconds.

Eben Lourens, the police officer who set the explosive, was the same man who had cut free an entangled Humpback whale in Gordon’s Bay some weeks ago.

“You win some, you lose some,” he said.