These headlines drive me crazy: Denmark’s Faroe Islands Continue Dolphin Slaughter, “Denmark is a Big Shame,” Save the Calderon Dolphins in Denmark.
The Faroes (also spelled Faeroes, or in their own language Føroyar) are internally self-governing… so this has little to do with Denmark. Denmark is a member of the EU but the Faroes aren’t. The Faroes are under the Danish crown and thus represented by Denmark abroad and protected by the Danish military, but not governed by the same laws at home.
The Faroes were settled from Norway, speak a language unintelligible to Danes, and were only acquired by Denmark because of a long chain of treaties.
Though the map says “(Denmark)” under “Faroe Islands,” their relationship with the Danish crown is more like Canada’s to the U.K.’s: They are a constituent nation of the Danish kingdom. So Elizabeth is the queen in Canada, but as far as what’s legal or illegal in Canada, that means next to nothing, and while the relationship of the Faroes to Denmark is a little closer than that, that’s not for lack of people (in both countries) advocating for total Faroese independence.
So this is like blaming the U.K. for French being spoken in Québec. Québec, and the Faroe Islands, have their own rich histories, cultures, and languages, independent of the queen that they share with a larger country that later acquired them by conquest or treaty (the U.K. and then Canada in the case of Québec, Denmark in the case of the Faroes).
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February 2, 2012 at 2:00 am
Troels Forchhammer
Though your explanation regarding the relationship between Denmark and the Faroe Islands is entirely correct, I thought I’d add something about the general Danish attitude towards the Faroese in this issue. My impression is that most Danes, of which I am one, support the Faroese in their traditional killing of the pilot whales.
Of possible interest to the general topic of this blog, the Faroese word for this occasion is _grindadráp_, where the _grinda_ refers to the pilot whale, and _dráp_ essentially means killing, but has, at least in the Scandinavian languages, come to mean murder.
The Danish view is largely that the pilot whales are in no way threatened with extinction, the method of killing doesn’t cause any undue stress or pain to the animal, and while the flesh may not be as healthy as it once were due to accumulation of various toxins (mercury, lead etc.), it is not such a large part of the Faroese diet as to be really dangerous to the Faroese. We are, in other words, speaking of the killing of animals in a way that is compatible to the slaughtering of cattle, pics, sheep etc. for human consumption (actually modern production methods often stress the cattle or pigs considerably more than the Faroese do).
All in all the whole thing seems to me to be blown wildly out of proportion by some pictures that look far worse than reality (try making a small cut in your finger and see how few drops of blood it takes to make the water in a large bowl turn red).
February 2, 2012 at 7:24 am
Jackson Crawford
All very well said, and thank you for the comment. And I agree that the violence of the event is blown way out of proportion – a lot more human beings die worse than that every year on this globe, and I´d like to see the outrage placed there.