Breaking Traditions

Should a society consider breaking away from a cultural tradition when it is no longer considered essential to sustaining life?

Every year for the last 800 years or so, the people of the Faroe Islands take part in the grindadráp – which means “killing of pilot whales”. In the distant past, whale hunting was an essential source of food for the Faroese – the meat and blubber was used for food, blubber was also used as a source for oil, the stomachs were used as floats, and parts of the skin was used to make ropes. Today pilot whale meat is no longer essential to sustaining life, so that makes the grindadráp cruel and unnecessary. The Faroese claim that…..

1. The hunt is a traditional part of their culture.

2. That the whale products used for food are not sold for commercial gain, but that it is distrubuted among the people of the community.

3. That pilot whales are not endangered.

Before I address these claims, let me describe the hunt.

The pilot whales are not hunted out at sea in the tradtional sense; instead they are herded into bays and forced to beach themselves or are pulled out of the water with hooks when they are close enough to the shoreline. In the old days, sightings of pilot whales was communicated from island to island by means of a large bonfire – there are 17 inhabited islands within the Faroes group. Rowing boats would gather behind the whales and slowly drive them to the chosen location for the kill. Today, the method used to communicate the sightings is via cellphones and motorboats are used to drive the whales into the bay.

Once the whales are close to the shoreline, the Faroese men use special knives to kill the whales – the use of spears and harpoons was outlawed by the Faroese Islands in 1985, as it considered these weapons to be “unnecessarily cruel to animals”. Dead whales are pulled onto the shore using a sharpened hook or gaff, live whales are pulled ashore using a blunt hook which is inserted into the animal’s blowhole. Once on shore a 15 cm knife is used to cut through the dorsal area and into the spinal cord where major arteries are severed. Since the whales are killed manually, death can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. The hunt is regulated by the Faroese themselves and is organised at a community level – there is no international body that regulates the number of whales killed or how the whales are killed. The slaughter is indiscriminate; whole families, pregnant females, lactating females, and calves are also killed. And the slaughter is not just restricted to pilot whales, dolphins are also killed in the frenzy. During the slaughter the bay and the beach is turned to a brilliant red colour by the blood of the pilot whales and dolphins.  The number of whales killed annually varies between 950 to 1500 animals – that’s for pilot whales alone, I couldn’t find statistics for any other mammals that may get caught up in the hunt.

The first claim put forward by the Faroese to justify the hunts is that it is part of their culture; a tradition. My answer to that is that although it sometimes is comforting to cling to old beliefs and customs, one must inevitably succumb to change – without change things would stagnate. A society only progresses and evolves if it is able to change. What was once a means to survival, has now become an initiation or a sport that is watched by adults and children alike. The second claim that they put forward to justify the grindadráp is that it is a source of food. That’s not true, the Faroese no longer need whale meat in order to survive. However, that source of food may come back to haunt them – the Faroese Ministry of Health has warned that excessive consumption of pilot whale meat is not a good idea, since it has been shown to contain high levels of mercury, PCBs and environmental poisons. As for the third claim of pilot whales not being engangered; this claim cannot be substantiated. There are no recent population statistics and pilot whale population numbers are unknown, the surveys that are cited are over ten years old. 

Environmental issues are complex and often emotionally charged, but there comes a point when a society needs stand back from the emotional issues and look at the reality of it. The reality is that the grindadráp is an outdated, unnecessary, and cruel practise that should be stopped.