Bad press day for Icelandic whalers
Oh dear. It's being reported in the Icelandic newspaper Frettabladid that 179 tons worth of the 7 endangered fin whales that where caught last fall have been buried in a land fill.
The whaling industry is claiming this is "entrails and bones," but Gisli Vikingsson at the Icelandic Marine Institute notes that the average weight of the fin whales caught was about 50 tons, so that's more than half the entire animal being wasted.
But wait, it gets worse.
When asked about the 100 tons of unsold whale meat that sits in freezers in Iceland unsold, Kristjan Loftsson, manager of whaling firm Hvalur, (who rather refreshingly appears to have skipped the PR spin training that most whaling industry spokespersons get) said "the delay was because firms must first test the meat for dangerous chemicals to see if it meets food industry standards."
Well that's reassuring, isn't it?
Comments
yeah - and like chemical testing takes 3 months! LOL... unless Icelandic scientists are REALLY slow something smells very fishy here (or more like rotting dead whales).
Posted by: Lisa | January 12, 2007 12:04 PM
When I first read this I thought "so? it's just entrails and bones right? Isn't this to be expected?" But I was just chatting to our Icelandic expert Martin and he said that this is 1/3 more waste than can usually be expected from a properly "utilised" whale, and that the blubber in other cases (eg in Norway) has to be treated before it is disposed of since it's so toxic.
Martin also says that even taking into account the buried whale waste and that in storage, that there is seemingly a lot of whale missing...
More on this as it comes to hand, stay tuned to oceans.greenpeace.org!
Posted by: Adele | January 12, 2007 3:38 PM
But but.. there's a thriving export and domestic market for whale meat. Are you somehow insinuating that they're *throwing away meat they could sell for money!*
Incidentally is that an average weight of 50 tonnes in the sense of 'we addded them all up and divided by 7' or in the sense of '50 was the most common weight', because I seem to recall the first one weighed around 40 tonnes and was described as big?.
Posted by: Martin | January 17, 2007 2:19 PM