Dávur í Dali, a social sciences student at the University of the Faroe Islands, offers this friendly correction to our post about how Paul Watson's TV attack on the Faroese pilot whale hunt backfired: I am writing to you to correct a small misunderstanding in one of your posts on the Faroe Islands pilot whale hunt. Your post implies that we actively hunt whales, as someone would hunt deer or similar game. This is not correct. The whale hunts are not prepared or planned events. They happen when we sight a pod of whales swimming through our fjords or in general vicinity...

14 July, 2012

When Paul Watson, the Canadian who heads the Sea Shepherd Society, attempted to disrupt a traditional pilot whale harvest on the Faroe Islands last year, canny local fishermen postponed the event until no whales appeared until after the HMS Brigit Bardot weighed anchor and departed the tiny country's waters. (See further update here.) This deprived Watson of gory footage for a TV series celebrating his latest charismatic crusade. Still, when the four-part series aired on US cable channels this spring, Faroese government officials braced for a backlash. What they got was something quite different: a flood of tourism inquiries. The documentary's B-roll footage of the...

08 July, 2012