'Blood everywhere': Horrific moment truck dumps unwanted whales into ocean
WARNING - DISTURBING CONTENT: Disturbing video shows large chunks of unwanted whale meat being dumped into a sea.
The footage was reportedly shot after the butchering of five northern bottlenose whales on the Faroe Islands on Wednesday.
In the video, a dump truck can be seen tipping its load down an already blood-soaked cliff.
Small bright red chunks of flesh tumble down into the ocean below, followed by large swathes of blubber and bone.
As the annual slaughter began again this year, Sea Shepherd founder Captain Paul Watson told Yahoo News Australia that it’s common for unwanted meat to be thrown into the ocean.
“What they do is they kill everything. They take what they need, and if they don't need it, they throw it away,” Captain Watson said from his base in the US.
“This all gets thrown over the cliffs into the ocean.
“We’ve documented where the bodies have been weighted down and sank to the bottom, so it’s like a... graveyard down there.”
Sea Shepherd say ‘archaic tradition’ must end
The Faroe Islands along with Taiji prefecture in Japan, are the last two major strongholds of mass dolphin slaughter.
Each year, residents living on the Danish autonomous territory slaughter hundreds of dolphins and whales in what’s known locally as the “grindadrap” which translates as “murder of whales”.
Horrifying accounts from July said the shoreline turned red with blood as the bodies of some of the 252 whales and 35 white-sided dolphins were sliced open.
Those taking part in the hunt say it is a cultural tradition, and an important source of protein for the island’s 52,000 residents.
Sea Shepherd have been monitoring the hunt since the 1980s and Captain Watson says now that the island has modern conveniences like Burger King and New Zealand lamb on supermarket shelves, the “archaic tradition has no place in the twenty-first century”.
‘Blood everywhere and screaming’ as dolphins driven to shore
Fishermen herd the marine mammals by placing large metal poles in the water and then bang them to create a wall of sound and drive the sonar sensitive creatures towards the nearest beach.
When a pod of a pilot whales or dolphins is spotted, the fishermen go out with boats to drive them to the nearest beach.
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The process can take between 12 minutes and an hour, but once the mammals are close to the shore, locals are alerted and the killing begins.
Captain Watson and many of his team are now banned from visiting the islands, but what he has witnessed at previous “grindadrap” was confronting.
“They wade into the into the water with knives and spears, and just begin this massacre,” he said.
“It goes on for a long time and there’s blood everywhere and screaming, because the entire pod is wiped out, regardless of sex, or age.
“Females are then driven up and then they actually cut them open, and afterwards the children go down there and start knocking their teeth out and taking their eyeballs.
“It's just, it's barbaric.”
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