Two Sea Shepherd whale hunt protesters arrested in Faroe islands

Two international volunteers with the Sea Shepherd conservation society face prison if found guilty on Thursday of interfering with a hunt for pilot whales in the Faroe islands.

Susan Larsen of San Francisco and Tom Strearth of Bremen, Germany, were arrested by the Danish navy earlier this week after following a flotilla of small Faroese boats thought to be heading for a “grindadráp” - a traditional Faroese hunt where dozens of migrating pilot whales are herded into a bay where they are then slaughtered by hand.

The new Faroese Pilot Whaling Act passed by the islands’ government – which many believe is specifically intended to prevent Sea Shepherd volunteers trying to stop the cull – could lead to two years’ imprisonment.

The annual series of pilot whale hunts in the self-governing islands, that lie midway between Iceland and Norway, are defended strongly by the government as a legal, community-based use of a renewable, natural resource for food.

But they are condemned by Sea Shepherd as an “unnecessary obscenity”. Pictures of the traditional grindadráps are marked by bloody water and whales being cut up.

According to Sea Shepherd, which has dozens of volunteers on the islands monitoring for suspected whale hunts and two boats at sea, 33 pilot whales were killed last year and around 1,300 were killed in 2013.

Captain Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd’s Canadian founder and president, who has warrants issued for his arrest in Japan and Costa Rica, said that the Faroese were acting irresponsibly.

The co-founder of Greenpeace, who now lives in Paris and directs a small navy of nine boats, said that the oceans were dying and that whales were desperately needed.

“We are killing the oceans. About 40% of all the food on earth comes from the sea and 40% of that goes to feed animals that humans eat. Rather than kill whales, we must get them back because the phytoplankton that are the base of all life depend on them.

“We must stop industrial fishing. No matter what we do on land, it will be as nothing if we do not bring life back to the ocean.”

A spokesman in the Faroese prime minister’s office said that the police were still gathering evidence but he expected the case to be heard in the magistrates court on Thursday. He confirmed that the Sea Shepherd boat Farley had been impounded.

“For hundreds of years the people of the Danish Faroe Islands have been herding migrating pilot whales and other small cetaceans into shallow water and slaughtering them. The grindadráp is the largest slaughter of marine mammals in Europe, and is widely criticised as being both cruel and unnecessary,” said Rosie Kunneke, a spokeswoman for Sea Shepherd.