Annual whale slaughter began today in the Danish Faroe Islands
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
July 2018

Apparently in the Faroe Islands it is perfectly legal to drive and kill a protected EU cetacean species, but it is illegal to push them back out to sea in order to keep them from harm’s way because that is considered ‘harassment. So these three Sea Shepherd women can proudly say that they successfully ‘harassed’ the dolphins for the purpose of saving their lives.

On Friday July 29th, Sea Shepherd Captain Jessie Treverton from the UK successfully passed through border security and re-entered the Danish Faroe Islands’ capital of Tórshavn for the first time since her arrest in 2014 to demand her court trial and the return of the seized Sea Shepherd vessel MV Spitfire.

This action comes after the Faroese prosecutor failed to set a court date after almost two years since the arrest of Captain Treverton on September 17th, 2014 for successfully guiding a pod of white-sided dolphins away from the killing bays of the Faroe Islands as part of Sea Shepherd Global’s campaign Operation Grindstop. After steering a large pod of dolphins to safety the Danish Navy chased, boarded and seized the British registered vessel MV Spitfire and arrested its three European crewmembers (Jessie Treverton of the UK, Celine Le Diouron and Marion Selighini of France), subsequently charging them with ‘failure to report sightings of dolphins to the authorities’ under the newly introduced ‘Grind Law’ and ‘harassing dolphins’ in an unprecedented interpretation of Faroese animal welfare legislation.

“Apparently in the Faroe Islands it is perfectly legal to drive and kill a protected EU cetacean species, but it is illegal to push them back out to sea in order to keep them from harm’s way because that is considered ‘harassment.’ So these three Sea Shepherd women can proudly say that they successfully ‘harassed’ the dolphins for the purpose of saving their lives.” said Sea Shepherd Founder Captain Paul Watson in response to the arrest in 2014.

135 long finned pilot whales and at least one white sided dolphin were killed today in a grindadrap at Sandavágur which (in a first for our Faroe Islands campaigns) was livestreamed to facebook by our volunteer crew on the islands.

Also a further 38 long finned pilot whales were killed at Sandagerdi beach just south of the main harbour at the capital Tórshavn.
We believe that all the pilot whales killed were originally the same pod spotted in the morning off Syðradali on Streymoy then the pod split before reaching Velbastaður just to the South before the larger part of the pod were driven to their deaths at Sandavágur while the smaller group were driven to Sandagerdi.

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