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Anti-whaling group to launch action in Faroes

Brigitte Bardot News

Anti-whaling group to launch action in Faroes

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  • A gray whale’s flukes are seen at the San Ignacio Lagoon, Baja
    California Sur state.

  • Sea Shepherd’s ‘M/V Steve Irwin’ navigates through huge swells
    in Antarctica’s SouthernÂ

Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd said Thursday it will erect a
wall of sound in the sea to deter the killing of
hundreds of pilot whales in shallow coves along
the Faroe Islands, a Danish territory.

Using two ships and a helicopter, the US-based activists will
start their operation on Friday, Sea Shepherd’s founder Paul
Watson
said at the close of a meeting of the International
Whaling Commission (IWC).

We intend to deploy acoustic devices to lay down a wall of
sound in the path of the migrating whales to prevent them from
approaching the islands, he said.

Some of the devices are floating, some are dragged behind
a ship and some are sunk in the ocean, he told AFP.

Earlier this year, Watson launched an aggressive — and, from
his viewpoint, successful — campaign against Japanese whalers
operating in the Southern Ocean surrounding
Antarctica.

Japan recalled its fleet in February, a month ahead of schedule
with only one fifth of its planned catch, citing interference from
Sea Shepherd’s vessels.

The IWC has banned all types of commercial whaling in the
Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Japan conducts its
hunt there under the guise of scientific research.
setting self-determined quotas averaging about 1,000 whales each
year over the last five years.

In the Faroes, Sea Shepherd will mobilise its flag ship Steve
Irwin and a fast-interceptor vessel donated by the Brigitte Bardot
Foundation, an animal rights group founded by the former French
actress.

Baptised Operation Ferocious Isles, the campaign will last two
months.

We don’t wish to dialogue about the obscenity, we wish to
stop it, said Locky Maclean, captain of the interceptor, the
Brigitte Bardot.

The rights of these whales to live takes precedence over
the ‘rights’ of the Faroese to murder them, he said in a
statement.

Whaling in the Faroes stetches back to the earliest Norse
settlements more than 1,000 years ago, and community-organised
hunts date to at least the 16th century.

Most Faroese consider the annual hunt — in which the
three-to-six metre sea mammals are driven by a flotilla of small
boats into a bay or the mouth of a fjord — as an integral part of
their culture and history.

Sea Shepherd has intervened several times before in the Faroes
with patrols, in 1985, 1986 and again in 2000.

But this is the first time they will attempt to prevent the
whales from entering the bays where the killing historically takes
place.

Watson compared the Faroes whale hunt to the slaughter of
dolphins that occurs each year near the Japanese
village of Taiji, highlighted in the Academy Award-winning
documentary The Cove.

The Faroe Islands, home to around 48,000 people, have been an
autonomous Danish province since 1948. The archipelago is situated
between Norway, Iceland and Scotland in the North Atlantic
ocean.

Pilot whales, which feed primarily on squid, have a distinct,
rounded head with a very slight beak. Males weigh up to three
tonnes, twice as much as females.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Red List of Threatened Species does not list the status of the
pilot whale due to lack of data.

But long-finned pilot whales — the kind hunted in the Faroes —
are generally thought to number in the hundreds of thousands,
perhaps as many as one million.

Read more here:
Anti-whaling group to launch action in Faroes

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