Shocking images have emerged showing the mass slaughter of whales and dolphins on the Faroe Isles.
Posing as tourists visiting the Faroe Islands, volunteers from the conservation group, Sea Shepherd Global, took photos when they were taken on nine separate hunts.
The volunteers said they witnessed the animals being forced into shallow waters by hunters where they were then killed using a “spinal lance” that is inserted around the animals’ neck and breaks their spinal cords.
Rob Read, the conservation group’s director, told Fox News that the volunteers went undercover to highlight “the continued barbaric killing of dolphins and pilot whales."
The Faroe Islands are part of Denmark, but they are not part of the European Union, therefore, EU rules banning whaling do not apply to them.
One volunteer, who wanted to remain anonymous, described the experience as “eye-opening”.
They said: “As the pilot whales were driven to the shoreline by the small boats the intensity of the thrashing bodies grew. Hooks were sunk into the blowholes and the whales were dragged onto the shore in a sadistic game of ‘Tug of War.’ We witnessed whales seemingly bashing their heads against the stones in a frenzy.”
The hunts took place in the summer; however, photos have only recently emerged.
The volunteer said in a statement: “We recorded children attempting to remove the teeth of several whales with nothing more than a pocket knife as well as removing slices of what appeared to be a tumour on one whale”.
During the hunts, 198 Atlantic white-sided dolphins and 436 pilot whales were killed, according to the sea shepherd volunteers.
The Faroe Islands government accused the conservation group of going to “any lengths to paint a negative picture of the Faroese whale hunt as ‘barbaric’, ‘unnecessary’, ‘evil’ and ‘lunacy’ describing Faroese as 'sadistic psychopaths', with the aim of inciting anger and outrage against the people of the Faroe Islands”.
On the Faroe Islands, whale meat and blubber is part of the national diet.
The government said: “Each whale provides the communities with several hundred kilos of meat and blubber – meat that otherwise had to be imported from abroad.”
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