One massacre at a time, please

Yesterday an e-mail was received from dear friend Wendy with a set of pictures:














What do we see here?
Each year, in Summer, the people of the Faröer Islands, that belong to Denmark, kill pilot whales and other small cetaceans.

Whales are sensitive, social animals with highly developed nervous systems.
They have a profound capacity to suffer distress, terror and pain.
The Danish islanders in motorboats first drive the whales into a bay.
The chase may be lengthy.
The exhausted, terrified and confused whales are eventually driven into the shallows.
Here the bloodbath begins.
The islanders repeatedly hammer 2.2 kg metal gaffs into the living flesh of each whale until the hooks hold.
A 15 cm knife is then used to slash through the blubber and flesh to the spinal column.
Next the main blood vessels are severed.
The blood-stained bay is soon filled with horribly mutilated and dying whales.

The Faroese islanders celebrate the butchery of their victims in an carnival atmosphere of entertainment.
Indoctrinated from an early age, children are often given a day off school to watch the fun. They run down to the bay and clamber over the carcasses of slaughtered whales.

Every year around 2,000 whales are driven ashore and cruelly slaughtered in the Faroe Islands, mid-way between the Shetland Islands and Iceland.
For centuries the Faroe Islanders have hunted pilot whales, driving entire schools into killing bays, where they are speared or gaffed from boats, dragged ashore and butchered with knives.
Although the Islands are a protectorate of Denmark, they have their own Government and regulations governing the pilot whale hunt or "grind" as it is known.

Aside from the fact that the number of North Atlantic long-finned pilot whales is unknown and they are listed as 'strictly protected' by the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, this is an act of barbarism and pointlessness.
By slaughtering 100 whales at a time, the Faroese are wiping out entire pods and family groups.
They are removing building blocks from the gene pool of the species and damaging the web of life in the North Atlantic and the North Sea.

The drive hunt is a practice abandoned elsewhere many decades ago, and now outlawed by other European states.
The inhabitants of the Faroe Islands have no subsistence need for whale meat, and much of the flesh is left to rot and be dumped; it cannot be exported, as it is polluted with heavy metals and other toxins and therefore cannot meet EU heath standards for human food.

Receiving this e-mail about the senseless killing of dolphins and whales, seeing the pictures and learning what it is about, created irritation.
These dolphins are killed by the Danes each Summer but right now Palestinian men, women and children are being killed by the Israelian Army.
What is a dolphin or a whale compared to a child?

Let’s say the campaign to stop the killing of dolphins and whales in Danmark next Summer is not exactly well planned.
Let’s take care of the dolphins and whales after we stop the massacre in Gaza, OK ?

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To sign the petition to end the killing of whales and dolphins on the Faröer Islands, click on:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/end-whale-dolphin-slaughter-in-the-faroe-islands



To sign the petition to end the massacre in Gaza, click on:

http://www.petitiononline.com/SaveGaza/