pilot whales

Essay by jarchiedavisUniversity, Bachelor'sB, November 2014

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Jalen Archie-Davis

Professor Copeland

GFCL

9 October 2014

The Faroe Island and Pilot Whales

The Pilot Whale is the most common whale found in any ocean around the world. Right now there is a situation among the Faroes people that many people agree with and many don't. The people of Faroe have been capturing and killing these whales for food somewhere around 1,200 years now. There are plenty of pictures of this process on the internet and it has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The pilot whale itself is not and endangered species, it is the long finned pilot whale that is one. Although it is the act of killing, I think their actions are justified.

Even though this has been going on for roughly 1,200 years the people of the Faroe Islands do not kill pilot whales because it is a tradition that they want to uphold.

They do it because it is their necessity for food. A very good comparison for the role that pilot meat plays in their lives is pig meat to Americans. This is where beef and bacon are a big part of our everyday life. The main difference in the two are that you cannot breed pilot whales like you can cattle or pigs.

When most people look at the pictures on the internet and think about this process, they think of these whales getting captured and being stabbed to death with hooks and spears. In reality this is very untrue. Killing methods for this whales have been greatly improved, especially in the past 30 years. Nowadays there are no use of spears, and the hooks are now rounded. The hooks are put into the blowholes of the whales, and this is necessary to drag them into a better position for...