WHERE’S THE MEAT?

WHERE’S THE MEAT?

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

Many of the Faroese and even some Danes are spreading messages entitled Sea Shepherd Lies.

They claim that Sea Shepherd is lying about the slaughter of whales. They say it is humane. We say it is not. They say the whales die instantly. We have documented that they do not. They say children do not participate in the Grind. We have documentation that proves they do. They say Sea Shepherd is lying about the mercury toxicity in the meat. We refer to Faroese doctors as evidence that what we are saying is true. The Faroese whalers seem to think that anything that does not dovetail with their world view is a lie.

Let’s take a look at the Faroese claim that the whales are killed for meat, that they depend upon the meat and that none of the meat is wasted.

Aside from the fact that we have documented entire carcasses lying on the bottom of the ocean we can use simple mathematics to also disprove this claim as bogus.

When the whales are killed they are divided into what the whalers refer to as “skinns”

1 Skinn = ca 50 KG meat and ca 25 KG blubber

With an average of 880 whales killed per year, that gives about 335.720 kg of meat and 167.860 kg of blubber

The Faroese government has advised to only eat the meat and blubber 1-2 times a month, and a study has shown that only about 17% of the islanders eat it more than once a month. 47% have said that they rarely or never eat pilot whale.

(http://www.diebucht.ch/tl_files/pdf/Pal%20Weihe.pdf)

For the purposes of this statistic, we can set the average high at 40% of people that eat pilot whale twice a month.

The population of the Faroe islands is 49,469. 40% of this number is 19,787 people.

A meal of meat consists of roughly .250 kg of meat and .05 kg of blubber.

Two meals a month result in a total of 24 meals a year, with a total of 6 kg of meat and 1.2 kg of blubber consumed.

This means that there every year the Faroese consume 118,722 kg of meat and 23,744.4 kg of blubber.

The average catch per year is about 335.720 kg of meat and 167.860 kg of blubber.

Each year, 216,998 kg of meat and 144,115.6 kg of blubber disappears. Where does it go to?
It appears that twice as much meat disappears than is eaten.

There has been some speculation that it is fed to salmon farms. I contacted the Faroese salmon farms and they denied this. There is a possibility it could be sold to fur farms in Russia. The Faroese have taken advantage of the European ban on trade with Russia to increase their salmon exports to Russia. This is interesting in itself because Denmark has banned trade with Russia and Norway has had a decline in salmon exports to Russia resulting in the increase in farm raised salmon exports to Russia. Again we have no proof of exports of the meat. But what we do know is that it must go somewhere. The question is where? Should not the Danish authorities investigate this?

I have been sent reports that many Faroese store the meat in freezers and when new meat becomes available they replace the old meat with the new meat and throw the old meat away. Last year Sea Shepherd took photos and film of Faroese people dumping whale meat off cliffs into the sea.
Some of the whale meat is sold to tourists in restaurants in the Faroes despite the Faroese saying it is never sold. But even this does not come close to answering the question of where approximately 217 tons of meat and 114 tons of blubber ends up.

It is a mystery that the Faroese and the Danish authorities should be obligated to explain.
The question is: Are Faroese deficient in the availability of meat?

There are about 70,000 sheep in the Faroes, about 20,000 more sheep than people. In fact the word Faroe means sheep. The Islands of sheep. Every year the Faroese slaughter about 30,000 sheep mainly 7 year old animals and lambs.

The Faroese salmon farms produce about 70 tons of salmon every year. The Faroese have an efficient industrialized deep-sea fishing fleet. These two industries give the Faroes the highest per capita income of any country in Europe.

The Faroese complain that they have to import vegetables, pork, beef, chicken, fruits. The reality is that they would still be importing the same foods without killing whales. They also import computers, cars and all the luxuries of western civilization. They pay for these things with the large scale exploitation of fish and their salmon farms. In addition they receive subsidies from the European Union without having to comply with European regulations.

The Faroese are one of the wealthiest places on the planet. There is simply no economic or subsistence need to kill Pilot whales and dolphins.

The provisions of the Faroese Parliamentary act state that the Faroese are permitted to drive and kill the following cetaceans:

. 1) Long-finned pilot whale, Globicephala melas
. 2) Northern bottlenose whale, Hyperoodon ampullatus
. 3) Atlantic white-sided dolphin, Lagenorhynchus acutus
. 4) White-beaked dolphin, Lagenorhynchus albirostris
. 5) Common bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus
. 6) Harbour porpoise, Phocoena phocoena

Sea Shepherd has observed the slaughter of whales in the Faroes for many years. What we see are a group of people (not all Faroese) that are obsessed with the killing. We see it in their excitement to rush into the sea to slaughter the whales, we hear it in their cheers and laughs, we see it in the joy they exhibit when they plunge their blades into the flesh of these gentle creatures. We see it in their children mutilating the bodies and playing with whale fetuses or poking out their eyes.

The whales do not die to provide meat. The kill figures alone demonstrate this is not the case. They kill because they believe it is a part of their tradition to kill whales, yet their ancestors did not have helicopters to spot them, motor boats to drive them, hydraulic cranes and trucks to transport them. a Navy to protect them. Their ancestors also had something that the Faroese do not have today and that was subsistence neccesity.

HERE IS WHERE THEY ARE DUMPING SOME OF THESE WHALES