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“The [whale] skin is starting to lose its integrity and if someone were to walk along, say, the chin — that is full of all that gas — they could fall in the whale. The insides will be liquefied. Retrieving them would be very difficult.

“I have fallen through the side of a whale up to my chest. It’s not very nice. And if the animal is up against the shore and there are waves battering it, and it’s moving, then you can imagine what would happen if it rolled over onto a child.”

The great beast is also a dead animal full of diseases, including a strain of dermatitis that causes skin on human hands to crack and break and itch and requires heavy doses of medication to remedy.

It is a fine mess. The dead whale, in its present location, smack in town, practically on the doorstep of Trout River’s Fishermen’s Museum and with the world-famous Seaside Restaurant — an international destination for foodies that has been written up in The New York Times — nearby, is turning what was initially a local curiosity into a full-blown crisis.

A dead blue whale washed up on a pristine beach in P.E.I. decades ago. Locals there dug a huge hole to dispose of it, which is one method that might work in Trout River. Other potential solutions include towing it to somewhere more remote, beaching it above the tide line and letting nature take its course. Or else cutting it into smaller pieces, taking tissue samples for research purposes — and hoping for the best.

Time, however, is running out. The tourists are coming. Soon. And a bloated whale will only stay bloated for so long before it potentially pops.

“If it could decay really fast and we were left with the skeleton of a blue whale — wouldn’t that be great — because it would be a tourist attraction,” says Doris Sheppard. “And it is an attraction now, because it is cold and the decaying process is slow.

“But once the warm weather comes, can you imagine the smell? It is starting to smell now. Monday it was faint. Today it is a little stronger.”

And what does a decaying blue whale smell like?

“Like a toilet. And it is only going to get worse.”

National Post