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Defender of the Seas

Feb 6, 2012; 10:19 AM ET

A few years ago, National Geographic Traveler ranked Denmark's Faroe Islands first among unspoiled island destinations. The landscape there is breathtakingly dramatic-impossibly sheer green cliffs dropping into blue harbors, cascading waterfalls, white shaggy sheep, coastal towns with buildings in bright, primary colors and grass-roofed cottages that look like storybook pictures come to life. Situated between Scotland and Iceland, the Faroes have a very distinct cultural identity drawn from their original Viking ancestry, with their own language (Faroese), a circular "chain dance" that consists of dancers holding hands and stomping feet along to Faroese ballads, and the annual grindadrap, or "grind," dating back to the 16th century. During the grindadrap, hundreds of pilot whales are rounded into a bay with a semicircle of boats, forcing the animals to shallow water where they become stranded. Then, as community onlookers, including children, look on, Faroese men kill the whales with knives, hacking into the whales' spinal cords. The many online photos and videos of these whale hunts show the men's faces splattered with blood as they set about their grim task, the bay running red from boats to shore. Gruesome as it sounds, the grindadráp is considered a celebratory festival by locals.

Captain Paul Watson

Photography By Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

It is this last cultural tradition that brought Captain Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to the Faroe Islands this past summer in a mission dubbed "Operation Ferocious Isles." The Animal Planet show Whale Wars follows Watson and his crew as they challenge whalers in remote corners of the world, and the show's notoriety ensured that his arrival would be noticed. Worried about the potential negative exposure, the Faroese police allowed no whale hunts while the Sea Shepherd boats-the Steve Irwin and the Brigitte Bardot-were on patrol. "They feel that if they don't give us a whale hunt than we won't have a show," Watson says. "But we're here to save whales, not to film whales being killed, so we're quite happy with that."

The Sea Shepherd's patrol lasted from June to August, the whales' peak migration months, and ended without a single pilot whale killed. But a report from the Faroe Islands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs later noted that as of September 2011 "there have been five whale drives, with a total catch of 406 pilot whales." The average annual catch, according to the report, is 800 whales, a number it calls "fully sustainable."

What Watson has witnessed in the Faroes in past years, he says, is nothing short of a "blood orgy" with no commercial or practical purpose. "They say it's been done for hundreds of years, it's a tradition. God gave them this gift from the sea. These guys get all worked up, they get drunk, they go down and they kill things. They kill everything-males, females, calves. They even rip the fetuses out of the bodies."

For Watson, a staunch vegan and animal rights supporter, no amount of whale slaughter is justified. But the senselessness of such mass killings in light of the meat that cannot and will not be used-high mercury and PCB content means that blubber and whale meat, while part of the traditional Faroe diet, should not be eaten more than once or twice a month by adults, and not at all by pregnant women or children-and the fragile existence of whales across the globe, make such blood celebrations even more heinous.

Watson with his flagship boat The Steve Irwin.

Whales In Crisis

The killing of pilot whales in the Faroe Islands is something of a sideshow in the global story of threatened whales, since that species is not thought to endangered. The American Cetacean Society estimates that there are about a million long-finned pilot whales and at least 200,000 short-finned pilot whales across the globe, adding that these numbers are decreasing and that hard figures are difficult to come by. It is their very social nature, notes the society, that makes pilot whales such easy prey for humans seeking to round them up-and so prone to mass strandings (they tend to stick together). Like the killer whale, pilot whales belong to the dolphin family and display dolphin-like intelligence and trainability

But even when whales are far from civilization-in the vast reaches of the Southern Ocean with its perilous storms, massive swells and ice floes-they are not safe from human predators. It is there, in dramatic, cinematic fashion that Watson and his mostly volunteer crew could be found on Season 4 of Whale Wars that aired this past summer, tracking Japanese whaling boats-particularly one whaling boat, the Nisshin Maru. Dubbed a scientific research vessel, the Nisshin Maru is permitted to kill 1,000 whales in the Southern Ocean each year thanks to a research loophole in the International Whaling Commission's (IWC) 1986 ban on commercial whaling. This, despite the fact that the Southern Ocean contains a whale sanctuary also established by the IWC to allow diminishing whale stocks to recover, to assess the impact of zero catch limits on whale stocks and to research the impacts of environmental changes such as warming waters and pollution on whale numbers. And despite the fact that no one believes the Japanese are harpooning and butchering so many whales for research purposes.

Adventure journalist Peter Heller, who traveled with Watson and his crew in the Southern Ocean in a 2005-2006 campaign and wrote the book The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet's Largest Mammals (Free Press) based on the experience, says the ruse of killing whales for research is a flimsy one that no one has the political will to challenge. "It's clearly a commercial operation," Heller says. "It's horrifying that they can tell these lies with such a straight face to the international community, and it's horrifying that the rest of the world doesn't care enough to enforce the international law." Also horrifying, he notes, is the drawn-out process by which these intelligent mammals are killed. "These explosive harpoons are supposed to kill them instantly-they never do," he says. "They hit them in the wrong place, the whales are too tough. So they just thrash around on the ends of these harpoons, and they start drowning in their own hemorrhage and they're crying out. Their babies, if they are mothers, swimming around. They reel the whales into the ship and they jab them with these electric probes. They run thousands of volts through them to try to kill them and that doesn't really work. And it takes 20 minutes for them to die.

The Japanese fleet's expected whale kill for 2011 was to be 900 minke and 50 fin whales. The naturally curious minke whale, which lives in every climate from tropical to frigid, is the smallest baleen whale and known for its series of vocalizations, including grunts, thumps and "boings."  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the population of minkes appears to be stable, but acknowledges that "Minke whale populations in the western North Pacific and the northeastern North Atlantic may have been reduced by as much as half due to commercial whaling practices." When it comes to the magnificent fin whale, a sleek, swift creature that can reach up to 160,000 pounds and live 80-90 years, there is no question as to its threatened status. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the fin whale as an endangered species-meaning it faces a very high risk of extinction-since the inception of the U.S. Endangered Species Protection Act in 1970. The fin whale is one of a host of whales on the endangered list, a list that includes the northern right whale, the bowhead whale, the blue whale, the humpback whale and the sperm whale. Endangered status may mean anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple hundred thousand of any one species are known to exist. For many species on the list, population numbers are simply listed "unknown."

Thanks to Sea Shepherd's vigilance in tracking the Japanese whaling ships, blocking the ability of the harpoon boats to unload catches, and making whale hunts impossible or frustrating them to such a degree that the ships turn home, Japanese whale hauls have declined dramatically in recent years

"We see real results," Watson says. "Our last [2011] campaign to the Southern Ocean, the Japanese left a month and a half early after only taking 17% of their quota, so we saved 858 whales. Last year [in 2010], we saved 528 whales. We cut the kill quota of dolphins in Japan over the last year by half-and not a single pilot whale has been killed here in the Faroe Islands [at least, not while Watson was present]. So I think that our approach is effective. People call us violent but I don't think we're violent at all. I call it aggressive nonviolence, but as Mr. King once said, you can't commit an act of violence against a non-sentient object and that's our philosophy, too. We don't injure people, but we will destroy equipment used to take lives."

Watson's World- find out more.

Brita Belli

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