Jane Goodall, the world renown zoologist, issues a call for hunting in the Faroe Islands to end
Jane Goodall, one of the world’s leading zoologists and a renown anthropologist, has very publicly joined the effort to end the pilot whale hunt in the Faroe Islands. She has issued an open letter to the authorities in the islands and in Denmark asking them to reconsider their pilot whale and other dolphin hunting.
This unprecedented call from Dr Goodall comes just after a large kill in the islands where it appears that in the region of 300 pilot whales were taken in a single hunt.
In the letter she highlights the cruelty of the hunting methods:
“The undeniable cruelty of the methods used to corral and kill these mammals has come into sharper focus recently. Entire pods of pilot whales and other dolphins are driven into the shallows of specific bays. Their strong social bonds, which usually help protect them in the open ocean, cause them to remain together even when faced with these highly stressful and deadly circumstances. One by one, they are killed using a method that may paralyse them before they bleed out and die. Those that are stranded must wait their turn, trapped in the shallow water. Typically, every member of the pod is killed, including dependent calves.”
The letter is co-signed by members of the Jane Goodall Cetacean Committee and draws on the assessment of the hunt recently published by veterinary expert Alick Simmons.
OceanCare thanks Dr Goodall and her experts for engaging with this issue and we hope that those in positions of authority in the Faroe Islands and Denmark will appreciate that people all over the world respect each other’s cultures and traditions but believe that where there is evidence of cruelty to animals, such practices must end.