Canada Chooses to Kill Over 500 Narwhals Rather than Save Them
December 4, 2008 · Print This Article
Once a year, Canada uses powerful icebreakers so hunters can gleefully kill thousands of baby seals and sell their downy white pelts. And yet, somehow those same icebreakers weren’t available when over 500 narwhals – whales with tusks resembling the horn of the fabled unicorn – became trapped under the ice. Instead of rescuing the whales, local hunters began killing them by shooting into the ‘blow holes’ where the animals surface to breathe.
From CBC News via Treehugger:
Elders and wildlife officials have agreed that the whales would otherwise die from starvation and a lack of oxygen as the sea ice closes in around them.
Hunters in Pond Inlet, a mainly Inuit hamlet of about 1,300, say they’ve been turning down requests from media outlets to fly into the community and cover the hunt.
Jayko Allooloo, chairman of the hunters and trappers organization in Pond Inlet, told CBC News that his group does not want cameras capturing images of whale carcasses laying about, in case some viewers think the hunters are wasting meat and blubber, also known as muktaaq.
Meanwhile, the organization that manages wildlife in Nunavut is defending the Pond Inlet hunters’ decision to kill all the trapped narwhals in what DFO has called a “humane hunt.”
“Those groups or individuals who are making these accusations, or trying to come up with ways to prevent this kind of incident [from happening], have to be aware this is a northern climate. It’s a harsh country,” said Harry Flaherty, acting chairman of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.
Narwhals are not officially listed as endangered, but they should be – experts say they’ll be greatly impacted by climate change, even more so than polar bears. Experts have said that narwhal hunting is not sustainable. Hunters in Pond Inlet are only supposed to kill up to 130 narwhals a year.
Treehugger notes that the DFO claims the noise from the icebreakers would have been too stressful for the narwhals. Yeah, because loud noise is really less stressful than seeing your family members killed right before you get shot yourself. That makes a lot of sense. How incredibly sad and sickening.
Link [CBC] via [Treehugger]
Photo credit: National Geographic
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A more recent article can be found at http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2008/12/03/dfo-narwhal.html
DFO is not claiming that a rescue would have caused undue stress. They’re saying that it would have taken too long to get to the site to do any good. The DFO claims it would have taken a total of 11 days to get to the site with an icebreaker, which doesn’t seem unreasonable when you take the location and season into account.
Also, the count of dead whales is well over 600 now. The article you linked is a few days old.
it’s stories like these, which have been increasing lately, that make me saddened to call myself canadian.
Those whales were dead no matter what anyone tried to do for them.
This article is nothing more than demonization. Those whales are food species in the north and would be greatly welcomed as nutritious, free range, hormone free and local sustenance.
This article demonstrates once again that Earth First is an all poser affair with no roots in ecology at all.
Whales are food too!
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