Where I live, deer season is fairly close to a religious rite.
Schools, including most colleges and universities, shut down for the week, which also coincides with the Thanksgiving holiday in late November.
We always just called it the “deer season break.” Thanksgiving and turkeys were a second thought.
During this week, lots of white-tailed deer become jerky and steak and processed patties. Some with “big horns” become wall mounts.
It’s natural food, organic, locally grown, no antibiotics or artificial hormones.
Just white-tailed deer in its natural state.
I have no real problem with this yearly rite. Indeed, it’s one in which I participate.
So how on earth can I criticize the Faroese?
Who are the Faroese?
Well, Faroese is adjective given to inhabitants of the Faroe Islands in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean between the Shetland Islands and Iceland. The islands are under Danish sovereignty, and Faroese are descended from Norse ( and Irish and northern and insular Scots) who came there during the Dark Ages.
These islands are very limited in what they can produce.
They have always grazed sheep and cattle on their islands, but those animals alone could not sustain them.
So they turned to the sea for food.
Among the ocean animals they consume are pilot whales.
And herein lies the problem.
Now, the pilot whale harvest is strictly regulated. These harvests, called grinds ( pronounced “grinneds”), are strictly regulated affairs.
The whalers can only hunt whales that come close to shore. And they can only drive them when the weather conditions are right.
They drive them to shore using stones attached to lines, which are thrown behind the whales to make them move in the desired direction.
When the whales get close to the beach, they are hauled ashore using blunt gaffs. The gaffs grip the blowhole, and whale is hauled on land. Then, someone comes in with a specially designed whaling knife (Grindaknívur) that is used to sever the whale’s spinal cord, through a cut through the cervical vertebrae.
The pilot whale is normally dead within 30 seconds.
The whalers sometimes take bottlenose, white-sided, and white-beaked dolpins in this same manner, and if they happen to run into some harbor porpoises, they dispatch them with shotguns.
Everything about a grind is strictly regulated– with great emphasis on animal welfare and the notion of a sustainable harvest.
They aren’t trying to destroy pilot whale numbers.
That’s the last thing they want.
They want pilot whales to continue swimming in the ocean near their islands.
They want those whales there every bit as much as West Virginians want white-tailed deer around.
It’s certainly true that whale meat is very high in mercury and cadmium, and physicians now recommend that Faroese limit how much pilot whale they eat.
But it still can be eaten.
Of course, this sort of behavior incenses the various animal rights groups that pretend to be about conservation.
And here, I’m talking about the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Now, you’d think that if a conservation society was opposed to a hunt, it would be because those animals are endangered.
Well, there is no evidence that long-finned pilot whales are endangered.
None.
The real issue for conservationists is that these whales have so much cadmium and mercury in them.
We should be really upset that our oceans are this polluted.
Real conservationists would be making common cause with the Faroese to make our seas freer of pollution. The Faroese have an actual reason to want the oceans cleaner. It’s not just a poorly thought out cause célèbre from someone in Los Angeles, London, or Toronto.
Ensuring that our oceans are safe to produce food for maritime peoples ought to be as much a human rights issue as it is an ecological one.
But that’s not what you’re getting from the Sea Shepherds or other self-styled conservation/animal rights organizations in the English-speaking world.
Never mind that in the English-speaking countries all sorts of ecological evils are being perpetrated.
Those issues are much harder to fundraise off of.
No, it’s much more lucrative to raise hell and lots of money about some people in a land you’ve never heard of, who you’ll never meet, and whose culture you’ll never try to understand.
But I’ve yet to see anything about the grinds that would upset me.
Because what I am actually seeing something very similar to deer season.
It’s a hunt for wild meat.
It’s not a drive to make a species extinct.
It’s about a people taking responsibility for their own food, and understanding that meat doesn’t come in plastic wrap.
It comes from a flesh-and-blood creature.
One that died so that you can live.
Nothing is more humbling than that.
What I see is a people reconnecting with both nature and their own past.
I don’t see murderous barbarians.
I see people comfortable in their own humanity and their own natures– from which they have happily chosen not to alienate themselves the way so many of us have.
They may make the waves crimson with blood when they kill the whales.
But in doing so, they reconnect with the old ways.
There was a time when all humans killed to survive.
Blood dripped from our faces and hands.
And we knew that the blood meant life.
Extinguishing the life of a prey species meant the satiation of hunger and good quality nutrition to power our growing brains.
But now, we’ve removed ourselves from the cycles of life and death.
We think we can legislate or moralize away all the death that happens so that we can eat well.
The truth is we can’t.
We can only make the death more humane.
We ultimately deny our humanity when we deny or try to find ways around this essential fact.
We’ve become too disconnected.
It’s a good thing there are still people like the Faroese who try to reconnect.
Even if they get defamed for it.
