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Displaying items by tag: Hunting

The Faroe Islands has announced it will limit its controversial dolphin unit to 500 for this year and next, as RTÉ News reports.

The decision comes after a Faroese governmental review prompted by a petition calling for a ban on the bloody hunt tradition that garnered 1.3 million signatures.

Almost 1,500 white-sided dolphins were killed in last year’s hunt, which employs a method known as “grindadráp” whereby boats surround cetaceans in a semi-circle to drive them into shallows where they are then beached and slaughtered with knives.

The traditional hunt has wide support in the Faroes, part of the Kingdom of Denmark and some 320km north of the Scottish mainland, where dolphins and pilot whales have fed communities for generations. Local leaders emphasised that the annual catch is “important supplement to the livelihoods of Faroe Islanders”.

RTÉ News has more on the story HERE.

Published in Marine Wildlife

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago