Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #11 September / October 2014
Culture
The Grind: Why the Faroese Hunt Whales

The Grind: Why the Faroese Hunt Whales

by Elin Brimheim Heinesen, Morten Ejner Hønge, Miranda Metheny
September / October 2014 |  asd

The Faroe Islands are famous worldwide not only for their beauty and culture, but also for the grindadráp, or whale slaughter. In an average year, the Faroese kill approximately 800 pilot whales in order to eat their meat and blubber, which is the Faroese national dish. This practice has provoked considerable controversy among anti-whaling organizations. In this article, we will look at the discussion from the perspective of two Faroe Islanders.

Some of the most common arguments against Faroese whaling are claims that the pilot whales are endangered, that it is a tradition that has no place in the modern world, that whales are an intelligent species that should not be eaten, and that whale meat is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Faroese journalist Elin Brimheim Heinesen responds to these arguments in excepts taken from her blog (http://heinesen.info/wp/):

The Faroese should stop killing pilot whales because the pilot whales are endangered.

The pilot whale is one of the most common whale species in the oceans all over the world, especially the long finned pilot whale. Pilot whales are not endangered according to the authorities in this matter. The NAMMCO (North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission) is the real authority on all matters regarding the North Atlantic pilot whale. The NAMMCO base their estimation on sightings – and they estimate that the number of long finned pilot whales in the North- and East Atlantic is 780.000, and that’s excluding the West Atlantic, so the number might be, even significantly higher. The ACS (American Cetacean Society) agrees with those numbers and the IUCN also agrees that the pilot whale hunt is, as they say: ‘probably sustainable’. The IWC doesn’t consider itself an authority on small cetaceans, of which the long finned pilot whale is one. So the pilot whale is not on the list of endangered animal species. The Sea Shepherd organisation stands alone in its claims that the long finned pilot whale is endangered.


Pilot whales swimming in the ocean

The Faroese have killed pilot whales for at least 1.200 years, so the pilot whales should probably have been extinct by now, if the pilot whaling in the Faroes was a threat to the population as a whole. Since 1584 (that is how long it’s been carefully monitored) the Faroese have killed 850 pilot whales (in later years around 800) on average a year, so that’s a tenth of a percent (0.1%) of the pilot whale population only in the North Atlantic, which is very far from exceeding the pilot whales’ reproduction rate at around 2 %. There is nothing to indicate that the pilot whale population is in decline. As long as the pilot whale is not endangered, this is not a rational argument. So this is a failed argument.

The Faroese should stop killing pilot whales because such a tradition doesn’t belong to the 21st century. They shouldn’t do this just because it is a tradition.

People in the Faroe Islands don’t kill pilot whales because it is a tradition. They do it for food, as they’ve always done. But opponents call this practice of getting food ‘a tradition’, because this way of living off of the natural resources of the ocean has been common on these islands for more than 1,200 years.

Pilot whale meat and blubber is so common and natural for the Faroese to eat that to them this food is no different than beef or bacon is to people in other countries, where they have a tradition for eating cattle or pig meat. It’s just that you can’t breed pilot whales in the same manner as you can breed cattle or pigs. But why would you want to do that, if there is an abundance of pilot whales around the islands living free their whole life? Why would the Faroese deprive the whales of that privilege and somehow cage them or put them in ocean feed lots?

Who’s to decide what belongs to the 21st century or not? Or which traditions are worth keeping for the Faroese or not? It is definitely not for people outside the Faroe Islands to decide. The right word for this is ethnocentrism. That is: judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one’s own culture. The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to his or her own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs, and religion. Ethnocentrism is not rational, so again a failed argument.

The Faroese should stop killing pilot whales because the whales are intelligent, sentient, and sociable.

Sea Shepherd founder Capt. Watson claims that it is a sign of highly developed intelligence that the whales have figured out how to live in harmony with nature, unlike us humans, so therefore they are more intelligent than people. Okay, if that is his logic, he could just as well claim a squirrel is more intelligent than humans. A squirrel also lives in harmony with nature, and nobody would say that a squirrel is more intelligent than a human being for that reason. Capt. Watson is just being manipulative.

There is no doubt that bottle-nosed dolphins are some of the most intelligent creatures in the animal kingdom. Dolphins are good at learning tricks, especially in captivity – also pilot whales to a degree. Dolphins are proven more intelligent than most other animals, but they are still very far from being as intelligent as people. And not all whales rank that high. The pilot whale is in the dolphin family, but pilot whales are not the most intelligent of the dolphins. Pilot whales are not especially intelligent in comparison to many other mammals either.

Other animal species that humans kill for food are also proven highly ‘intelligent’. So this argument is inconsistent, if those who claim it is wrong to kill pilot whales because of their intelligence do not also oppose the killing of other intelligent animals for food.

Whether humans should refrain from killing “intelligent” animals or not is a matter of opinion. And there is no rational reason for claiming that one opinion is morally more right than the other. Also: How intelligent should an animal be to obtain a rank between the untouchables? How would you measure that to be able to set a border between highly intelligent and “stupid” animals?

Yes, pilot whales are sentient and sociable, that is true. And so are all other animals too, more or less. Animals, most people in the world eat – like cows and pigs, even chickens – are also sentient and sociable. So you can’t on the one hand say that the Faroese shouldn’t kill whales on these grounds, and at the same time accept the killing of other sentient and sociable animals.

If you are against the killing of animals because they are sentient and sociable, you are inconsistent if you don’t include all animals in the equation – that is: you must also oppose the killing of cattle, pigs and chickens, yes, any animal in fact. That is unrealistic.

The Faroese should stop killing pilot whales because pilot whale meat and blubber are contaminated and it is dangerous for the Faroese people’s health to eat it.

The Faroese will likely stop the pilot whaling gradually over the coming years, because pilot whale meat and blubber does contain mercury/methyl mercury at levels considered too high. Pilot whales also contain other toxins coming from man-made pollution, like PCB and DTD. And there are indications that exposure to some of these contaminants may affect human fetuses and their development. This fact is absolutely relevant and the majority of the Faroese people recognize this. But the anti-whaling activists often exaggerate the effects of this contamination, which are more subtle than they let people believe. There has, for instance, not been one single reported fatality due to eating pilot whale meat and blubber, not ever.


What's for dinner? Whale steak and vegetables.

The Faroese health authorities recommend that pregnant women, or women who plan on being pregnant soon, should not eat pilot whale foods at all, as the critical levels for methyl mercury intoxication of pregnant women and fetuses are lower by a factor of 2–5 than for the general population. They do not recommend that pilot whale meat and blubber should be served to younger children, while it seems to be within safe limits for the rest of the population to eat pilot whale meat and blubber once to twice a month.

The Faroese people are not indifferent to this unfortunate development. People are taking action personally – many do not serve pilot whale meat and blubber to their children any longer, and most younger women as well as child-bearing women choose not to eat pilot whale meat and blubber at all. But as long as the health authorities haven’t recommended that the Faroese population as a whole completely refrain from eating pilot whale meat and blubber (which, by the way, is the Faroese national dish), and, as long as pilot whaling is done in a responsible, sustainable, care-taking manner, the Faroese see no reason for stopping pilot whaling altogether. And they think that there is absolutely no valid reason for others to interfere in Faroese matters, trying to force the Faroese not to utilize this natural resource in their own country. •

The Hunter's Perspective

by Morten Ejner Hønge

The Faroe Islands are a small island nation very bound in deep traditions, with our ring-dance, our national costume, and our long history. We live very close together, and we still cherish our values and our heritage as we have done throughout the centuries. We are descended from the great Vikings, and it is from them we get our stubbornness. We have eaten pilot whale since we first arrived on these islands of the North Atlantic over a thousand years ago, and it is still part of a daily life: we are not prepared to stop doing this because some foreigners disagree.

Whale hunting was very necessary in the old days, when hunger was a major problem in the Faroe Islands. Sometimes we had to eat seaweed or worse just to survive, and anyone caught stealing a sheep received the death penalty, so you can imagine how the discovery of the pilots whales seemed like a gift from heaven. The meat would be shared among everyone who had participated in the grind, or whale killing, and everyone who lived nearby. It was free, good meat from the sea. Whale meat still makes up a significant portion of our diet today.

Since April 2014, an organization called Sea Shepherd has been in the Faroe Islands. Its members have tried everything they can to get the world to hate us for killing whales. In return, we have treated them like our own people and been very nice to them, even if they are there to try to get us to change our way of life. But we won’t stop, because it is part of our culture and tradition. For us, the whales have always been a valuable food source for which we have been extremely grateful.

The whales are killed in the most humane way possible. We don’t go looking for them, but only drive the whales that have come closer to the shore themselves onto the beach so we can kill them quickly and humanely. A knife called a mønustingarin is struck into the whale near the blowhole, killing it instantly. After the whale is dead, it is cut to allow its blood to flow out. When the whale is bled out, we drag it onto the beach. The bleeding is done in the water because it is cleaner and gets the blood cleansed away quickly. This makes the process look messy, because the water is full of red blood after the killing. But if you would kill a cow in the ocean instead of in a slaughterhouse, hidden from sight, it would look very similar.

After the whales have been dragged up onto the beach, the meat is divided among everyone who participated, and who lives in the area. The beach is full of people during this process, so it is a very social event and everyone gets their share. Much of the meat also goes to retirement homes, hospitals and the homeless to feed people. None of the meat goes to waste; everything is used.

Whale meat helps many people who have little money for food, and it is therefore still a great need in the Faroe Islands and will probably continue to be so for many years yet. Because we are so far away from the rest of the world, our food is very expensive to import. Fishing is a major part of the general collective Faroese food source, and most people eat fish here several times a week.


Morten Ejner Hønge is a grindadráp supporter, hunter, and founder of the "whale wars faroe island - hvalakríggj í Føroyun" group on Facebook, which has people discussing both sides of the whaling controversy. https://www.facebook.com/groups/whalearsfaroeislan/948935571787983

We feel it is much better to eat fresh food from the sea than meat from factory-farmed animals. It has long been a necessity for us to kill the whale and we will continue to do so for many more years, sticking to our old traditions that have kept us alive on these remote islands for many years. We will never forget these things, because they are what makes us Faroese.

The Faroe Islands are a great place on earth; a place that must be experienced at least once in a person’s life. Come here and discover some of the traditions we have and enjoy our great hospitality. We love our nature and take great care of it. Discover an amazing place on earth; come visit the Faroe Islands! •

If We Lose Our Foods,
We Lose Who We Are

by Elin Brimheim Heinesen

Compiled with permission from her blog http://heinesen.info/wp/

I was born in the late 50′s in the Faroe Islands. At that time we pretty much had a subsistence way of life in this remote place on earth with a hostile climate and an environment that humans could never hope to survive in without eating animals.

In winter, our region is stormy and dark for months on end, and the summer is very short. There are no trees except some imported trees in sheltered areas inside the villages and just a few edible plants. And yet, somehow we, the Faroese people, have survived here for more than a thousand years, relying on an intimate knowledge and understanding of our environment for our survival, constantly walking a tightrope between life and death.

In my childhood we still harvested most of our own food, integrating healthy, wild edibles into our diet. Most of our food supply was right outside our front door, and we used time-tested methods for living off the land and the sea. Our people were unencumbered, only depending on nature’s resources and the skill in our hands. Sudden food cost increases or empty grocery shelves caused by turmoil on the international market were not our biggest concerns. The only uncertainties were the whims of nature.

I remember the foods of my childhood. We ate mostly fish, some sheep meat and quite a lot of whale meat and blubber, served with homegrown potatoes. And afterwards we would have porridge made from homegrown rhubarbs, for instance. Our storage of dry and salted food and our new freezer were filled with fish, sheep meat and whale meat and blubber, my family had provided directly from natures larder. Our dairy products were from local farmers. But the grains, flours and sugar we used for baking bread and cakes were imported. And we only ate vegetables and fruits, if we could afford it. They were very expensive, because they came from far away, so they were luxury foods, we could not have everyday.

But things changed. Our fishing became industrialized. We got money on our hands. And suddenly we were able to import exotic foods from countries far away, like oranges and bananas. When I was a teenager in the 70′s, we probably already ate fifty-fifty, half traditional Faroese food, half regular European food. Today the division is more like eighty-twenty, at least for people living in the bigger towns, while people in smaller and less affluent villages still try to reduce food costs by holding on to the old traditional diet.


Sheep grazing on a hill in the Faroe Islands. They are part of the Faroese standard diet.

But it’s very doubtful whether the modern foods replacing the traditional foods, are any better or healthier. The opposite is more likely. The closer people live to towns and the more access they have to stores and cash-paying jobs, the more likely they are to have westernized their eating. And with westernization comes processed foods and cheap carbohydrates—soda, cookies, chips, pizza, fries and the like. The young and urbanized are increasingly into fast food. So much so that type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other diseases of Western civilization are becoming causes for great concern in our country too.

Well, it seems that there are no essential foods—only essential nutrients. And humans can get those nutrients from diverse sources. One might, for instance, imagine gross vitamin deficiencies arising from a diet very scarce on fresh fruits and vegetables. People in southern climes derive much of their Vitamin A from colorful plant foods, constructing it from pigmented plant precursors called carotenoids (as in carrots). But vitamin A, which is oil soluble, is also plentiful in the oils of cold-water fishes and sea mammals, as well as in the animals’ livers, where fat is processed.

These dietary staples also provide vitamin D, another oil-soluble vitamin needed for bones. Those living in temperate and tropical climates, on the other hand, usually make vitamin D indirectly by exposing skin to strong sun—hardly an option in the long and dark winters in the north. If you have some fresh meat in your diet every day and don’t overcook it, there will be enough vitamin C from that source alone to prevent scurvy. Traditional Faroese practices like freezing or drying meat and fish and frequently eating them raw, conserve vitamin C, which is easily cooked off and lost in food processing, so eating dry fish, sheep or whale meat and blubber is as good as drinking orange juice.

Fats have been demonized in modern western cultures. But all fats are not created equal. Wild animals and / or animals that range freely and eat what nature intended have fat that is far more healthful. Less of their fat is saturated, and more of it is in the monounsaturated form (like olive oil). What’s more, cold-water fishes and sea mammals are particularly rich in polyunsaturated fats called n-3 fatty acids or omega-3 fatty acids. These fats appear to benefit the heart and vascular system. But the polyunsaturated fats in most Europeans and Americans’ diets are the omega-6 fatty acids supplied by vegetable oils. By contrast, whale blubber consists of 70 percent monounsaturated fat and close to 30 percent omega-3s.

A young woman of childbearing age may choose not to eat certain foods that concentrate contaminants. As individuals, we do have options. And eating our fish, our sheep and our whale meat and blubber might still be a much better option than pulling something processed that’s full of additives off a store shelf.


Tvøst og spik - a traditional dish of the islands, consisting of pilot whale meat (black), blubber (middle), dried fish (left), and potatoes

How often do you hear someone living in an industrial society speak familiarly about “our” food animals? How often do people talk of “our pigs” and “our beef?” Most people in the modern world are taught to think in boxes and have lost that sense of kinship with food sources. But in the Faroese hunting and farming village culture the connectivity between humans, animals, plants, the land we live on, and the air we share has not been lost––not yet, at least. It is still ingrained in most Faroese people from birth.

Many of our young people and people in bigger towns are quite influenced by western urbanized culture and food habits. They are slowly getting alienated to our old traditions. However, it is still not possible, really, to separate the way many of us still get our food from the way we live in this society as a whole. How we get our traditional food is intrinsic to our culture. It’s how we pass on our values and knowledge to the young. When you go out with your father, mother, aunts and uncles to fish in the sea, to heard the sheep, handle the wool, to gather plants, to hunt birds and other animals or catch whales, you learn to smell the air, watch the wind, understand the way the currents move and know the land. You get to know where to pick which plants and what animals to take.

This way of life has been an integrated part of our culture for so long, and it still is to a degree, especially in the smaller villages, where people share their food with the community. They show respect to their elders and the weak in the society by offering them part of the catch. They give thanks to the animals that gave up their life for their sustenance. They get all the physical activity of harvesting their own food, all the social activity of sharing and preparing it, and all the spiritual aspects as well. You certainly don’t get all that when you buy prepackaged food from a store.

That is why some of us here in the Faroe Islands are working hard to protect what is left of our old way of life, so that our people can continue to live and work in our remote villages, as independently as possible from polluting transport systems and a fraud-full modern economic infrastructure. Because if we don’t take care of our food, it won’t be there for us in the future. And if we lose our foods, we lose who we are. PT

Elin Brimheim Heinesen is a Faroese journalist and freelance consultant. For more on this subject and her complete blog visit http://heinesen.info/wp/.
The Grind: Why the Faroese Hunt Whales
Writer: Elin Brimheim Heinesen, Morten Ejner Hønge, Miranda Metheny
Images:
EileenSanda: Whale hunt [title]
earl53: Pilot whales
Miranda Metheny: Whale steak and vegetables
Erik Christensen: Sheep, scenery from Hvalba, Faroe Islands
Arne List: Tvøst og spik - pilot whale meat
Sources:
• "If We Lose Our Foods, We Lose Who We Are" Elin Brimheim Heinesen, heinesen.info <http://heinesen.info/wp/blog/2012/05/21/if-we-lose-our-food-we-lose-who-we-are/>
Miranda was the editor for these articles and wrote the introductory paragraphs

Miranda Metheny retains all copyright control over her images. They are used in Parrot Time with her expressed permission.

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

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