Trip to the Faroe Islands

One should be so blessed, as I feel right now, to have spent the past week in the Faroe Islands.Visiting so many places in the world, I have never have I felt so welcomed anywhere else. Welcoming Pete and I was not an easy task for the people there. After all, the evidence showed that we were "Anti Whaling", and we were visiting a "Whaling Country". Despite all of that, we had the most amazing experience and the warmest welcome.

It started with Marita at the airport. She saw two strangers that rented a car from her place, that had no hotel room for the night. She invited us to her house to use her spare bedrooms. Marita also introduced us to her 15 years old niece Anja, who later found out that we were not in favor of whaling to say the least, or we could have been Sea Shepherd spies. We had to regain her trust.

The next morning we went to do a radio interview, it was live and we could have said anything that we wanted. Later in the day we had our TV interview right on one of the Grint (Grind) beaches, this one is located in Torsavan (http://sv.internet.fo/dov4407.wmv) .

It was so hard for us, we wanted to hate them but we just could not. As people, there was nothing to hate. Slowly I started to get it. I started to understand what it is like to live on small islands, where nothing grows, maybe a few potatoes; with no army or navy; with only one TV station; without big corporate America. You do what you can to survive.

Whale hunting is a bizarre thing for me. They are so much into this culture. It came from times when they were starving, and the sea got them the meat to eat. It is like a religion to them. Maybe in their subconscious it is still like a gift from GOD. I talked to a guy who is one of the leaders of the "Grind" as they call it. I told him that the world already made the decision that killing whales is wrong. I told him that he does not have the money and PR to reverse the world opinion. This battle he already lost.

I was asking myself, why do we hate them so much? Then it came to me. It is because they are killing the wrong animal. When I say wrong, we have been fascinated by them since Jonah in Bible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Jonah. Now whales are the stars. We just love them, and we are right. They are magnificent creatures, huge, powerful, smart and yet so gentle. So we decided that whales are not on our menu. We also passed laws about it. Somehow they got better luck than the 2500 tigers left in the wild that are probably going away. There is no TV show to save them. They do not make the front page.

We love smart animals, we love cute animals, so we give these animals a break. The unfortunate ones, like the pigs for example, that are very intelligent, are just not cute. So we factory farm them, we are cruel to them, and we just buried them alive in Korea, when they got sick. Yes over one million in January 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbOMH19LKgY

The people in the Faroe Islands do not do these things. The people of the Faroe Islands do not kill people - the most intelligent species out there. We do! We just call it "War" the other group that we kill is "The enemy" and that makes it right to kill people. The people of the Faroe Islands see animals as food. Cute and smart does not buy the animal a free ticket to life. Unlike us, (not us the activists that do not eat animals), they believe that an animal, before it is being consumed, needs a respectful life. As you can see in my pictures, their sheep are free, they build them little barns to escape the weather, they do not have factory farming on the islands.

The whales for them are just another form of food. Just like Blue fin Tuna to us. Data is showing that blue fin tuna is about to be extinct thanks to Mitsubishi, it's large freezers, and consumers who eat it. According to Faroe Islands statistics, there are between 100,000 to 800,000 pilot whales and they kill about 800 a year that is between 0.01%-0.08%. (IWC 1989 Numbers http://iwcoffice.org/conservation/estimate.htm, Wikipidea information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Faroe_Islands) I DO NOT promote the killing of pilot whales, I think it is horrific, but if you watched the movie "Earthlings" we actually do worse.

I have heard many comments that we should "Educate them". I have to say that we can educate each other. The fact is that they will listen, and hopefully change, but Tyson Foods, MacDonald's, KFC will not change, there is money involved. For us, in the "Western World" animals are not just food, they are a commodity, a money making machine with no feelings of pain and no emotions. We call them the "Happy cows of California". Whom are we kidding?

I was curious why it was illegal to sell Pilot whale meat, and why was it shared for free around the villages where the Grind happened and access to meat is shared with the nearby villages. The answer is, that putting money into it will commercialize it and will promote greed for self profit. They also are not selling them to aquariums. Sound familiar, Japan?

I made many friends there, many Faroese became my Facebook friends, they have open discussions on my page with my activist friends. I was invited to their houses. Remember the "Virgin Knife" video. Yes, Jens invited me to his house to talk to us. Jens had killed Whales in his life. He even let Pete record our conversation. His wife just invited me to have a vegan meal at their house. They never had a vegan meal, neither did his two kids. So we are all going to eat grass for one night, as they were teasing me.

Health Issue
We have met Doctor Pál Weihe. Something that could have taken a week to arrange in Los Angeles, was a 5 minutes phone call. He also sent his assistant in the snow, with his car, to pick us up. He let Pete record the meeting on Pete's camera. It was fascinating. What we learned was that he strongly recommend for example, that a man 70Kg or 154Lbs will not eat more than 3.5 grams of whale meat a day. That is 1.27Kg or 2.8Lbs per year. That by itself is not worth killing whales anymore, as people are telling me. The people that listen to him are the young ones. On the top are pregnant women that will NOT touch it ever, after that is the young generation. The most suborn are the old men. They just do not care as much about their health.

The government is going to put out it's own recommendation very soon. In my opinion it is probably going to be very objective. Please remember, there is no money or profit in this. It is what they do. There is not big corporate America after this.

Pollution
A very interesting forgotten issue. We polluted the whales, with our coal burning practice, we put Mercury, DDT and PCB in the ocean, by and large, not the 47,000 people of the Faroe Islands. So, how dangerous is mercury to whales themselves? how many whales does it kill? Who gave the whales mercury, PCB and DDT in the past decades? I would find it hard to argue that the people of the Faroe Island did that to the whales. It is the coal producing and coal burning nations that poisoned the whales.

Solutions
Will this ever stop? Well, they know that they are eating poison. The poison that we put in the ocean.

I think the best thing to do, before you judge them is buy a ticket, go to the Faroe Islands, talk to them. You will see what I say. The more you do that, the more of a chance we have to save the whales.