There’s a travel column every Tuesday on Common Sense & Whiskey. In past weeks we’ve been to the Arctic, Easter Island and Vietnam, among other places.
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The annual Grindadráp is on in the Faroes. It is a spectacle in which, as The Guardian puts it,
“hunters surround pilot whales and dolphins with a wide semi-circle of fishing boats and drive them into a shallow bay where they are beached. Fishermen on the shore slaughter them with knives.”
In the past decade or so the annual event has become a spectacle in which international media gang up on the tiny archipelago. I’m not going to contend that the Grind, as it’s known, is anything but gross. But there are two sides.
For my book Out in the Cold, I took what I think is a measured look at the question. Here’s an excerpt from the book.
THE GRINDADRÁP
“Good luck” in Icelandic is hvelreki, with an idea something like “may a whole whale wash up on your beach.” The Faroese don’t wait for luck to produce whales. They spot them when they’re out sailing.
In The Old Man and His Sons, Heðin Brú (1901-1987), a bespectacled gentleman with a fatherly air and one of the Faroes’ most important novelists, describes life in the village of Sørvágur, now adjacent to the airport on Vagar. Set vaguely in the first third of the twentieth century in subsistence era Faroes, it describes the generational strains on a rural society dragged into modernity.
Central to the tale is the whale slaughter, the grindadráp (“the grind” for short), and its importance in feeding the islanders in an era when the við Áir whaling station was at its busiest. In 1928 the Faroese county medical officer wrote, “…it cannot be emphasised enough how important this [pilot whale meat] is for the population, for whom the meat, be it fresh, dried or salted, is virtually their only source of meat.”
A tinge of the exotic attaches to the grindadráp today, a summoning of vestigial heritage, a suggestion that these quiet, unassuming people fall into some bloodlust frenzy wild and savage, like Viking wildmen in helmets with horns.
Once the grindadráp was a quirky cultural asset, but not anymore. Today the grind, more than any other single thing, pits the world against the Faroes.
•••••
When a fishing boat or a ferry spies a pod of whales, a call goes out and word races through the village. Even in the middle of a work day people drop what they are doing and muster. Employers accede. Fishing boats form up in a half circle behind the whales and, banging on the sides of the boats and trailing lines weighted with stones, press the whales into a shallow bay.
Townspeople wait on the beach with hooks and knives. Mandated under new regulations, two devices, a round-ended hook and a device called a spinal lance are designed to kill the whales more quickly and thus more humanely.
The hunter plunges the hook attached to a rope into the whale’s blowhole. Men line up tug of war style to pull the whale onto the beach. It takes a line of men to haul them out, for pilot whales may weigh 2,500 pounds.
The purportedly humane spinal lance severs the spinal column and the main blood vessel to the brain causing loss of consciousness in seconds. Critics maintain this works only when the whale is on the beach, not in the water, the site of the initial struggle, and so the spinal lance can only be used at the end of the torturous trauma of the drive.
••••
The grizzled fisherman, the mayor, the citified insurance salesman - all the townspeople find common cause, shoulder-to-shoulder at the shore, harvesting the whales and dividing the spoils.
The harvest is distributed evenly, for communal benefit. This is real, retail, hands-on constituent services for the mayor, who works out what size the shares should be and hands out tickets. People go to stand beside the whale indicated on their ticket. Those sharing each whale butcher it together, right there, right then. The municipality is mandated to clear the remains within 24 hours.
The animal is cut and pieces laid on the ground skin down, blubber up. Then the meat is cut from the whale and laid atop the blubber, the whole take is divided, and the shareholders gather up their haul and carry it home. There is no industrial processing.
Even today whale accounts for a quarter of all the meat consumption on the islands. Custom and tradition tip the scales against the advice of the Faroes’ Chief Medical Officer Dr. Høgni Debes Joensen, who declared in 2008 that no one ought to eat whale meat anymore because of the presence of DDT derivatives, PCBs and mercury in the meat.
The Faroese live in a society modern in every way, right down to attempts to figure out more humane ways to kill the whales, and whale meat is no longer required for the diet as it was in the days of Heðin Brú. The subsistence era was a different time. So the question arises why, if the meat is unhealthy, the tradition must continue.
Photos of a grind, the sea bright red with blood, are frightening, revolting even, and the idea of slaughtering one of the world’s most intelligent creatures is unsettling. But it must also be said that the pilot whale is not endangered. The North Atlantic Marine Mammal Conservation Organization reckons the annual Faroese slaughter takes less than 0.1 percent of the pilot whale population. Gunnar Holm-Jacobsen, the diplomat, stresses that “We don’t sail out and find whales. We only hunt schools of whales that are incidentally spotted from land or from a boat.”
Proponents call the grind a combination of sport, tradition and a way of obtaining cheap food. It is also a direct link to the islanders’ past. Opponents assert that none of these justifications hold up in the twenty-first century. Yet in a place not very accommodating to agriculture, livestock, fishing - and pilot whales - have always been central to the Faroese diet.
You can be sure that the collective personality of an isolated people will mix resourcefulness with resistance to change. Pride, too. Pride in the ability to live and flourish in an outpost. Pride in the traditions that make the place unique.
When your community has repeatedly been to the brink of starvation, when you live on a spot of land as precarious as these slippery cliffs of obstinate basalt, when you have a storied heritage dating all the way back to Odin and Thor, when you have come through all this and more and today you thrive, you may be forgiven for having the stout view that your culture is worth preservation.
Elin Brimheim Heinesen, a Faroese musician, sharpens the point: “What is completely natural for people in the Faroes, seems so alien to other people, who have never lived here – or in similar places – so they can’t possibly understand the Faroese way of life. And thus many of the aspects of this life provokes them. People are often provoked or disgusted by what they don’t understand.”
She wants the casual visitor to understand that life still is really different on this small archipelago in a vast ocean, “that it is necessary to interrupt your daily work when the time is ripe to bring the sheep home and slaughter them, or go bird-catching, or go hare-hunting – or participate in pilot whaling – and, additionally, to prepare and store the food you have provided for yourself and your family. This food constitutes a large part of the total food consumption and is completely indispensable for most families – especially for the 12 percent in the Faroe Islands who live at or below the poverty line.”
Activists battle the grind and the Faroes’ legislature battles back. The Parliament, called the Løgting, briefly voted in 2014 to ban members of the marine wildlife conservation organization Sea Shepherd from sending protesters. That legislation was dropped when Denmark determined it would likely be illegal.
But try, try again; a 2016 proposal to keep anti-whaling activists out equates actively protesting for an organization with work, for which foreigners require a work permit.
Hapag-Lloyd and AIDA, two big German cruise lines, have suspended or lessened arrivals in the Faroes to protest the grind. (This may be devastating to waterfront vendors but it has its appeal for those of us who believe there is a special place in hell for the inventor of the mega-cruise ship.)
The Faroese point out that the grind is an opportunistic hunt, not commercial, the meat is not exported and is shared across the entire community. The distribution of the spoils generally happens without money, and on the spot.
In the conservative British magazine The Spectator, Heri Joensen, the lead singer of the Faroese band Tyr writes, “In the Faroes, it is not uncommon to kill your own dinner — be it sheep, fish, bird or hare. I have slaughtered many more sheep than I have cut up whales and no one seems to care. I find that strange. Why the double standards? Because whales are endangered? The ones we eat aren’t. There are an estimated 780,000 long-finned pilot whales in the Atlantic. In the Faroe Islands, we kill about 800 a year on average — or 0.1 percent of the population. An annual harvest of 2 percent is considered sustainable: compare that with the billions of animals bred for slaughter.”
Joensen says that buying the same amount of beef he got in a grindadráp would have cost more than £800.
Proponents argue that the urban lifestyle of protestors is what leads to mercury poison in the whales, after all. Trouble is, the double standards defense will always be outnumbered. So, for that matter, will any other defense.
The Faroese complain that most of their critics eat meat and the animals those critics eat suffer every bit as much as a grindadráp whale. Factory farming, they say, is an industrial scale horror for profit, while the grind has no financial motive. How, they ask, can those who live entirely apart from the source of their food pass judgement on small islands, far away?
There are a few more photos in the Faroe Islands Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Get the book Out in the Cold here.
Every Friday I suggest a dozen or so articles for your weekend reading, and there’s a photo quiz. See you here, Friday.
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