Engagement Ring Faroe Islands 49

Engagement Ring In Faroe Islands.

By Aamir Mannan.

Every year in the Faroe Islands, a territory of Denmark, hundreds of pilot whales and other species including bottlenose dolphins, Atlantic white-sided dolphins and northern bottlenose whales, are hunted for their meat. The techniques used are intensely stressful and cruel. Entire family groups are rounded up out at sea by small motor boats and driven to the shore. Typically, once they are stranded in shallow water, blunt-ended metal hooks are inserted into their blowholes and used to drag the whales up the beach, where they are killed with a knife cut to their major blood vessels.

TALKING POINTS

In 2012 the Faroese killed 713 pilot whales. Over 1,000 pilot whales have been killed in the 2013 season.

Pilot whale meat is heavily contaminated

The Faroese hunt other species including bottlenose and risso's dolphins

In recent years our campaigning against the hunt has taken a lower profile in the belief that overt and vociferous public pressure has only encouraged the hunts to continue and actually increase in response to public outcry. However, our more recent engagement with communities and authorities in the Faroe Islands has shown some potentially promising ways forward as we continue to seek solutions through a better understanding of these practices, and engagement with likeminded grassroots coalitions in the Faroe Islands. No level of hunting is acceptable to WDC, and we continue to seek new ways to stop this practice.