The Faroese justify the grind on two grounds: it is food, and the whales are plentiful. Islanders told a BBC correspondent that with 800,000 pilot whales in the North Atlantic, and rarely more than 2,000 taken a year in the Faroes, the population was not at risk. They also asked whether visitors had ever watched the daily slaughter of farm animals in their own country’s abattoirs.
The hunt is old. Russell Fielding, a geographer at the University of the South in Tennessee who has studied it since 2005, calls the grindadráp the longest continuously practised whaling tradition in the world, and one that has changed relatively little.
Meat that is never sold
The food argument rests on how the catch is shared. Whale meat is not sold on the Faroes, the BBC reported. The community divides it, and any surplus goes to hospitals and old people’s homes. Fielding told National Geographic in 2014 that the police chief apportions the meat by a traditional formula and villagers butcher their own share.
The BBC correspondent watched more than 1,000 people gather on the quay in Tórshavn at six in the morning. They cut up 138 whales in under three hours, and one man said more than 90% of each animal was eaten. Air-dried meat, eaten raw in thin slices, counts as something of a delicacy, a 28-year-old Faroese hunter, Bjarki Dalsgarð, told National Geographic.
There is no whaling trade either. Everyone has a day job, Dalsgarð said, and joins in when the call goes out by phone, radio or social media.
Rules on when a hunt can happen
The grind is opportunistic. A pod has to be close to one of 23 approved landing beaches, the weather and currents have to be calm, and there have to be enough people to crew a dozen or so boats. In some years, 2008 among them, conditions never lined up and no whales were taken.
Fielding’s 2012 study put the yearly average across three centuries at 838 pilot whales and 75 dolphins. He drew on islanders’ records of every animal from every grind back to 1709.
Where the defence is weaker
Health has eroded the food case. High levels of mercury and other toxins found in pilot whales led the islands to advise pregnant mothers not to eat the meat. Fielding says the meat is shifting from a full meal towards a symbolic food.
The population case has a gap too. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists long-finned pilot whales as data deficient, meaning there is not enough evidence to judge the state of the North Atlantic population. There is no fixed quota on the hunt.
This year’s hunting sharpened the dispute. In the first grind of the year, on 4 May near Sándavágur on Vágar, more than 125 pilot whales and several Atlantic white-sided dolphins were killed, according to Sea Shepherd. The group alleged that at least 15 foetuses and small juveniles were left out of the official count. Its estimate of about 110,000 kilograms of meat and blubber has fed the argument that the hunts now exceed local need.
The next pressure point is trade. The Faroe Islands’ trade arrangements come up for review at the end of 2026, and campaigners want whaling on the agenda. A UK parliamentary motion backed by 72 MPs from six parties has made the same demand.
