The man with the knife, whose name is Albert, is taking no prisoners. With 15 dead bodies lying around him and the same number yet to come he has no time for pleasantries. Standing in a pool of blood, he is momentarily distracted by strangers hovering around with cameras, writes Frank Shouldice.
Albert scowls at the intrusion, clearly unhappy to be photographed at work. Does he want to answer a few questions? No, he does not. "You journalists are all the same," he grumbles, wiping his brow. "You see this and soon as you go back to your country you condemn us in your newspapers."
He has a point. Some of the locals wonder aloud if we outsiders are Greenpeace activists seeking to depict the Faeroe Islands as a place of wanton savagery. Five years ago Arni Conradsson filmed a whale drive in the capital Torshavn which ended with 137 pilot whales herded ashore for slaughter by scores of knife-wielding locals. The distressing, panic-stricken sounds of the thrashing, captive whales and the bare brutality of the cull suggested a blood lust among the inhabitants of this remote set of islands.
Island culture
But culling whales is part of island culture here, carried out not for the "fun" of hunting but for the dietary value of whale meat and blubber. The culling practice has been refined somewhat - traditional harpoons were banned in 1986 and blunt hooks are phasing out traditional steel hooks - but the Faeroese remain mindful of how unfavourably the outside world judges them.
Although the Faeroese economy depends almost entirely on fishing, there are no whaling boats in its fleet. Whale meat is available in local restaurants, but unlike their counterparts in Norway and Japan, the islanders do not sell their catches commercially. In keeping with traditional social practice each catch is shared among the hunters and people in the immediate locality, starting with those most in need.
Every cull, monitored by the Faeroese Ministry of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, is recorded under a strict policy of resource management. On average there are fewer than 1,000 pilot whales killed annually in the Faeroe Islands, representing a tiny fraction of the Atlantic's entire stock of 780,000 pilot whales.
Of course there is an element of opportunism about it. Whenever a pod is spotted nearby fishermen will attempt to beach the whales on sandy inlets, kill them in shallow water and immediately transport the carcasses for cutting up.
The kill I witnessed was the first of the year. It began after dawn in Torshavn with a trawlerman's radio report of 30 pilot whales a few miles offshore. The message was relayed to elected whaling officials and the district sheriff and by 6 a.m. some 30 fishing boats joined the pursuit, guiding the group, or pod, towards the beach at Sandagerð.
Should the pod break for open water the regulations state the whales must be let go. On this occasion the pod swam as directed, heading towards the beach where the animals got into difficulty in shallow water. Within minutes it was over, all 30 whales culled with straight cuts to sever the spinal column. Given the gargantuan size of these mammals it wasn't surprising that blood dyed the sea red.
Long-bladed knife
Each dead whale was then towed to the dock at Toshavn. Carcasses were lowered by crane onto the pier where Albert awaited them with a special long-bladed knife known as the grindaknívur. In keeping with international regulations each whale was measured and recorded. Albert went to work, slicing them open, exposing their intestines to release body heat. To the outsider it was a sensory jolt on this damp September morning to see a fugue of steam rising from these formidable creatures harvested from the deep.
On hearing of the Torshavn cull a schoolteacher brought her class down to see the animals. The children watched with a mix of curiosity and wonder, splashing their bright yellow Wellington boots in the crimson pool at their feet. Although to us it might seem a peculiar choice for a teacher to make, she had brought her classroom into the real world. The Faeroese people live on 18 islands pitched in the middle of the North Atlantic. The sea is their inheritance.
"The ocean is our best friend and our worst enemy," says local historian Petur Petersen at the maritime museum at Leirvík. "We have lost to the ocean and we live from it. You have to treat it with respect." You get the feeling this is not just lip-service but a time-honoured ethos like the American Indian interdependence with buffalo. A week later another pod of about 500 pilot whales was spotted off Norddepli. One hundred and fifty were culled and the remainder made for open sea.
"Animals in factories"
"We kill the whale to eat the meat the same way people in Ireland kill cattle for food," shrugged a trawlerman in Vestmanna. "Okay, the kill is not nice but we try to finish it as quickly as possible. You think it's better to raise animals in factories? Where they never even get outside before they are killed?"
The irony is that Faeroese tradition is not the biggest danger for pilot whales. The animal's liver and kidneys, once regarded as a speciality, are no longer fit for human consumption because of a high mercury content accumulated from industrial waste. Since the 1970s whale organs were deemed unsafe and four years ago prescribed levels of consumption for meat and blubber were revised on medical grounds.
"You know, it makes me laugh - the people who complain about us killing whales are the same people who poison the sea," shrugged the fisherman. "But the people who poison the sea don't care if they kill everything in it."
