Parsing Grindadráp (with Tamsin Blaxter)

Tamsin Blaxter, researcher and writer at TABLE, joins Feed co-hosts to talk about her forthcoming publication: "Parsing Grindadráp". Grindadráp is a Faroese whaling practice that's understood both as important to local food cultures, and as barbaric, primitive and cruel. In this chat, we use grindadráp as a case study to explore: what is animal sentience? What's different about killing whales versus farmed animals? Where do older food traditions fit into the present? How does international media coverage impact local debates? And lastly, what does the evidence say about whether this is a sustainable practice?

Read Tamsin Blaxter's blog Parsing Grindadráp here

For more info and transcript, please visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode26

Transcript

Matthew

Quick note, this episode contains graphic descriptions of animal deaths.

Tamsin 

So there's this kind of cycle where every summer, pictures appear in tabloids around the world of the sea turning red, of rows of slaughtered whales of children being present. In these kinds of very bloody scenes, lots of things that people find very shocking. And the emotions are very, very high on both sides.

Matthew

That was Tamsin Blaxter, researcher and writer at TABLE. Before joining TABLE to explore the values and evidence behind different food systems debates, Tamsin was a linguist.

Tamsin

This practice is called Grindadráp. The vowel in the second syllable - if you want the linguistics description, is a diphthong with a rounded open mid back vowel followed by an unrounded vowel of the same height and backness, so it’s something of like [ɔː] followed by [ɑ], but it's quite short it's something like, dráp.

Matthew 

Tamsin Blaxter is talking here about how to pronounce Grindadráp, a whaling practice unique to the Faroese Islands. We asked her to describe the method or technique of Grindadráp.

Tamsin

Well actually I will also introduce the etymology to answer that question. So a grind is a pod of whales, dráp is just the word for slaughter. So this is killing not whales, but pods of whales. And the way it's done is they spot pods. And they use boats to drive them into a bay. And once they've been driven up over a long, narrow Bay, which gets shallower very gradually, they can force one of the whales to beach itself, and that would traditionally have been done by spearing at the right angle. But nowadays, it's not that's not necessarily how it works. And the others then, because they're very social species, they don't abandon members of pod, so you can enforce them all to beach themselves. And then they're slaughtered on the beach traditionally using, I guess, machete type knives, nowadays using a device called a mønustingari, which is translated as spinal lance. So it's kind of like a, if you could imagine a little lance with a little arrowhead that is plunged into the animal's neck just behind the head to sever the spine. So they’re killed very quickly when they're killed.

Matthew

So why are we talking about a Faroese Whaling practice? Tamsin Blaxter recently wrote a blog for TABLE on the subject. And why did she recently write this blog?

Tamsin

This is a part of a world that I've been interested in for a while. So I'm a bit familiar with this landscape and the languages and the history. But as an animal ethics and food contest that's played out very much in public in big letters in newspapers every year. It really interested me because it's like most of the arguments here about the importance of food, traditions and history. Like, what is sentience, what kind of cruelty is acceptable? The health implications of eating different kinds of meat, all these are arguments that you can find about eating other kinds of meat or meat from other kinds of sources. Or at least there are close analogs of all these arguments in most such debates, but the people making the arguments are quite different. And the media dynamics of this are quite different, and maybe the particular identities, the identity issues at play, are a bit different. And I think that makes it really a good case study to help us think about some of these issues. It's also just a really interesting case study, from the point of view of what is sustainability and what might a really different future food system look like.

Samara 

Welcome to feed food systems podcast presented by TABLE. I'm Samara Brock,

Matthew 

And I’m Matthew Kessler. And today we parse Grindadráp. What place does whaling have in a sustainable food future? We also what’s different about whaling compared to the morality of killing farmed animals,? What role does power play in this debate, and in this incredibly charged conversation, should we be paying attention to something else beyond the media headlines.

Samara 

First off, can you locate us? Where are we geographically?

Tamsin 

The Faroes are an archipelago in in the North Atlantic so if you're used to the geography of the UK, you Scotland you go up you find Orkney, you go further up, you find the Shetland Isles and you go further up still and you find the Faroes. and they are legally self governing but also partially under the Danish crown. And so historically, they were part of Norway and then part of Denmark.

Matthew 

Can you tell us the two different stories of Grindadráp. So there are those who talk about it from the perspective of those who are engaged in the hunt. And then there's those who are more anti it and perhaps like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Tamsin 

So I'll start with Sea Shepherd. And they're not the only conservation group that opposes this, but they are by far the most prominent one. So I think they would say something like, in order to survive on these islands, it was necessary for people to do relatively terrible things, to cause these very intelligent, very social sentient being animals,an immense amount of pain and suffering, kill them in this very inhumane way. In order for human beings to survive. But modern technologies then have removed that necessity, you can survive on these islands without doing this anymore. And at the same time, modern technologies created a whaling industry, which decimated the populations of many other cetaceans around the world. 

And that led to the moratorium, which is kind of the international recognition that this wasn't moral, I think they would also say that those modern technologies, some of them have found their way into Grindadráp as well. And the whales, in some sense, don't have the chance. Now, this isn't fair, traditional hunting, where it's a real contest, this is now something more unjust or ignoble. 

Matthew

So while Sea Shepard argues that this degree of animal suffering isn’t necessary, the other sides tells a very different story.

Tamsin

This is a tradition that goes back as long as people have lived on the Faroe Islands. And it kept the ancestors of the current Faroese people alive through hard times. And it also kind of defined them as a distinct culture. So it's a really big, important part of the identity of this culture. Also, all eating meat involves causing pain, involves blood, involves things that might be shocking to modern audiences. But the only difference between Grindadráp and farmed meat is that that happens in secret and private away from public view, in the case of farmed animals, and it happens out in public with Grindadráp. But at the end of the day, these cetaceans, these whales, dolphins are animals that have live full natural wild lives, not meaningless lives in cages. So if you don't romanticize whales, this seems actually morally better than getting meat in other ways. I think that would be the argument for it – well, the story that we might tell. Incidentally, these are actually dolphins not whales, they’re called pilot whales. But strictly speaking, they're a kind of dolphin, is the main species that's taken.

Matthew 

When we talk about different actors advocating for different futures, part of that comes with how do we understand the past and either a romanization of the past, or using the past as an example of what we should do, or we shouldn't do? And sometimes traditions aren't that long, they're actually invented. So I'm curious, can you talk a little bit about the history of Grindadráp? How far back does it go?

Tamsin

Yeah. So that's, that's a little bit contested in itself. If you were to read uncritically the Faroese government's writings on this, or the kind of whaling groups, you would get the sense that this form of whaling has been carried out in this way ever. Since the Faroes were settled, at least were settled by Nordic speakers. So maybe 1200 years. And I think if you ask historians, the evidence is– you know, it’s generally agreed the evidence doesn't really bear that out. We do know that people have been eating whales in the Faroes since they were settled, as indeed they were in pretty much all the communities around North Atlantic, North Sea. But this particular practice of driving pods of whales, this method of hunting, our first records are that like the 16th century and we actually have pretty good records from the 16th century onwards of catch levels and that kind of thing. And there’s a suggestion that it may have developed as a response to economic pressures that made the previous means of subsistence on the Faroes less viable around the 15th century. So, yeah, whether you think that a 500 year old tradition is old or recently invented, I guess depends on the scale that you normally consider your history and like many such things, it is both old and also constantly changing. And it is also both old and not as old as its claimed to be.

Matthew

Tamsin points out that practice of Grindadráp in the Faroese is distinct from other types of whaling. There was an earlier subsistence culture of whaling in coastal communities, and it has also followed a different trajectory than the commercial whaling industry, led by Norway, the USSR, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Tamsin

There was a big increase with new technologies in commercial whaling in the first half of the 19th century for oil and they hunted the populations of whales not to extinction, but to commercial extinction to the point where it was no longer commercially viable. Then in the latter part of the 19th century, so the 1880s we start getting new technologies for whaling being invented in Norway. I'm thinking here things like explosively propelled harpoons, explosive harpoons, much faster ships. And that enabled them to start targeting populations of whales that had previously been too fast to use with traditional rowing boat based whaling techniques. From that point onwards, whaling increased pretty much continuously, they moved from population to population as they decimated them. During the 20th century, that peaked in 1964. And then a moratorium was finally brought in in the early 80s: 82. So we're talking about like, I think the height was something like 80,000 Whales taken a year, and maybe 2.9 million whales taken over the 20th century. So that's the context. 

Faroese whaling, Grindadráp has had peaks and troughs. Well, there was a peak in the 60s, there was a peak in the 80s. And it's come down since then. But the peak was like 2500 a year, and the steady level it has been between 500 and 1000 a year. Basically ever since. And those are pretty consistent numbers, if you look at past centuries, and these are species that aren't commercially hunted. 

Samara 

So you talked about the historical cultural reasons, the arguments for pro carrying on this tradition? And then also touched a little bit on ethical considerations. What are some of the other criticisms and defenses of this practice?

Tamsin

The people who oppose this practice, I think, from the outside, most often cite animal ethics questions around the experience of the whales, like what kind of animals are these? Are these special animals in terms of their level of sentience, their level of sociality? How kind of sophisticated and complex these animals are, that shouldn’t mean we shouldn't kill them. And there are criticisms of the manner of slaughter, that it's slow, that it involves these animals swimming around in their relatives’ blood for hours, potentially, in really slow, difficult hunts. That it involves witnessing their relatives’ deaths. It's also criticized as I said the basis that the food is unneeded. But then further from that, that it's demonstrably wasted. So it's not generally sold, it's generally distributed by law, it can't be sold. And this must be distributed by a formula to the local population. If you compare the figures, this is really hard to do, because the research isn't really there. But the conservation groups make the argument -that if you compare the figures of what the amount of meat that people report that they eat, and the amounts that are being taken and distributed, about two thirds of it must be thrown away. It's also because of heavy metal concentrations because of pollution, it's now not safe for human consumption. So those are all arguments that are made against it 

Matthew

Tamsin continued to cite arguments against this practice from within the Faroese community.

Tamsin

 And from within, I think there's a big argument that this is like harming the international reputation of the Faroes. This gives them a bad name. And particularly comes from the tourist industry, but also from the aquaculture industry, which is really growing very fast on the Faroes. 

Then I think the arguments in favor of it. I've already said, the catch has been pretty similar for centuries, it's probably 1% of the population of pilot whales. So that suggests that it should be sustainable. I think a lot of other defenses of it might take the form of criticisms of the alternatives. So the alternative is more reliance on imported food. And that's not sustainable either for totally different reasons. That’s not sustainable because it relies on fossil fuels. It makes the Faroes not a self sustaining community. It also alienates people from the way their food is created, and where it comes from. Whereas Grindadráp is a very, very different kind of way of relating to food and subsistence. 

It places food outside of commerce, it makes obtaining food a community event that everyone comes together for - it makes it meaningful. And then I think also, there is definitely an argument among people who practice this that basically people romanticize whales, but these are like cows and  if you're okay with slaughtering cows, there's no reason you shouldn't be okay with slaughtering these animals. Those I think are the substantive arguments that are made in favor of it, and then there are also– there’s also a sense of if the criticism is unfair, that it's cultural imperialism, these outsiders coming and telling us how we can live our lives and live our traditions. That that's not acceptable.

Samara 

So you’ve been talking about these pros and cons and sort of this. I mean, for lack of better framing, like a rational measured way, but from what you're describing, I imagine people must get very emotionally charged about this issue. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of like the emotions you've experienced in doing this research?

Tamsin 

Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult to talk as a outside person trying to write about this, it's quite difficult to get to talk to people who actually carry this out. And I haven't managed to speak to them. But I've read what people have written. And I've talked to people around it, and I've talked to people campaigning against it. And yeah, the emotions run very, very high on both sides. So for the last few years, since the Faroese government took the step of basically, progressively banning the anti-whaling ships from Faroese waters, the main strategy that have been used by those campaigning against this practice has been to take photos of it, and send them to the press around the world. And so there's this kind of cycle where every summer, pictures appear in tabloids around the world, of the sea turning red, of rows of slaughtered whales, of children being present in these kind of very bloody scenes, lots of things that people find very shocking. You can find endless newspaper articles that describe this as barbaric, as primitive, as cruel that describe the people doing this in those sorts of terms. And then you can find Facebook groups with you know membership larger than the population of the Faroes by really considerable degree, exchanging comments in much more flowery language than just ‘barbaric’ and ‘cruel’ about how awful the people who do this must be. And it has to be said that some of the conservation groups that oppose it have also engaged in that kind of language in the past. So that's on the one hand, this is clearly deeply offends the sensibilities, the morals of many people who look on from the outside, and they are not shy to say so. And that is felt as equally offensive, a really, really fundamental attack on the cultural identity of the people who carry this out, that this is a real positive community defining practice that, you know, produces food which everyone remembers eating from their childhood and that you were really advised to get your kids to eat lots of in the 70s and 80s. Because it was a really good way to get micronutrients, and good source of protein, good source of fat and that kind of thing. It’s a childhood comforting food that people remember. So the feelings are very, very high on both sides.

Matthew

As Samara was saying, you're describing everything in a manner that’s measured and rational and I’m having a bit more difficulty reading your own position in this and how it might have evolved over the course of the piece.

Tamsin

So my own position, I come to this, as someone who doesn't eat meat, doesn't eat animal source foods. My starting point is one of an interest in animal ethics, animal suffering. That's why I first came to the decision to stop eating animal source foods. And before that my family are vegetarians. So I've come from like solidly, interested in animal rights and therefore not eating these foods point of view. I don't know, I've been trying to work out whether my views have changed over reading about all of this over talking to people that are involved. And I mean in a kind of fundamental way-- no, I wouldn't have eaten this beforehand, and I wouldn't eat it now. I have been to the Faroes I did consider. Because it's, you know, part of the cultural experience of visiting a different place. And I actually really do respect that as a notion. I care about cultural diversity and variation, and there being other perspectives, and blah, blah, blah, like that all seems really meaningful and important to me. I didn't when I went to the Faroes feel like I could square that enough to try eating these things myself. At the end of the day, I don't personally feel comfortable with the idea of killing these animals in this way or probably any way. 

But I also don't think it's the right thing to focus on, if that's your main goal in sustaining populations of animals in the wild, because I don't think there was very strong evidence that this is a population under threat, or at least not from this - might be under threat from heavy metal poisoning and some other things, but probably not from hunting.

Matthew

So Tamsin doesn’t condone the practice of killing animals for her own personal consumption and she also doesn’t find evidence that these are being hunted to extinction or even reduced population levels.

Tamsin

And I do think I've been persuaded that you can really learn something about different ways of relating to food by engaging in an open minded, interested way, with traditional practices like this, even if they might not, in some respects, line up with your own ethical position. I think the Faroes is a really interesting place in terms of food culture, because this isn't the only traditional subsistence practice which is still carried out there. Traditionally, harvesting seabirds eggs, formed a very important part of subsistence, sheep farming, but like really small scale, small holding of sheep, and various very unusual ways of preserving mutton are really important parts of traditional Faroese subsistence. And those are all actually still practiced to different degrees. And in a much more widespread way than like the traditional subsistence practices of say, like where I grew up in England are still practiced in the population at large. And there's an increasing movement, I understand, towards exploring new methods of like community, non commercial subsistence, and that all– so, like vegetable gardening and this kind of thing– and that really reflects a very different community relationship with food, even though the globalized food system is definitely now a huge part of how the Faroes feeds itself. So I think it's really worth engaging in these things in a measured, interested, open minded way, and seeing what we can learn.

Samara 

It's interesting, do you think having researched this, talked to people on either side of the debate, is there learning from other people's perspectives? Or is that just not how this is going to unfold? This is a black and white issue? Is this a binary? Or is there some sort of middle ground that people could consider meeting?

Tamsin

I mean, on the one hand, it's a remarkably inflexible tradition in some ways. Like, if you look at the history of commercial whaling, at least on paper, it was possible to come up with regulations like you can’t take whales under a certain size. So you know that you have to let them grow to adulthood and have a chance to reproduce before they are subject to hunting. You can’t take pregnant females, you can't take nursing females. All those regulations were broken in really widespread ways, which is why in the end, the moratorium had to come in, but at least in theory, there were ways that you could try and moderate that practice and come to some kind of middle ground which would make it sustainable.

In the case of Grindadráp, because you're legally obligated to report if you spot a pod of whales, and it is then offered to every to the grind foreman at every bay it passes, as I understand it, so there isn't there can't be any centralized means of controlling catch. And the decision is just do you slaughter the entire pod or none of them. So all these mechanisms that were used to kind of come up with a theoretical middle ground for managing wild populations, only taking some individuals and so on aren’t really available here, you kill the whole pod or you don't kill any of them. 

Matthew

Tamsin then reflected on ways to have a constructive conversation within this debate.

Tamsin 

And the nature of the debate really makes it hard to find anybody speaking in a kind of middle ground, speaking in a balanced way about it, but there are people, the academic I spoke to - Ragnheiður Bogadóttir, who works on this, from the point of view of as a sustainable non commercial subsistence practice, in the context of talking about, like long term food systems sustainability and move away from the globalized food system, like that's a really interesting, very different point of view. And the other interesting thing is that the people I spoke to agree that even though the effect of these newspaper articles and the kind of extremely inflamed rhetoric is that everybody gets polarized on both sides, it has also actually caused gradual cultural change. 

Matthew

So what has cultural change looked like?

Tamsin

So it is the case that it's quite age stratified, who is interested in this practice. It's quite age stratified, who's willing to eat whale, and how much whale people eat, though, that's probably also to do with health warnings. So even though this very polarized debate doesn't look like it's going anywhere, the evidence is that long term, the conversation is gradually shifting. So I don't know that's in a way that's optimistic to me that maybe it is possible for the community to be gradually having conversations about this, gradually changing its thinking about this, even as the surface conversations that you read, don't seem very productive year by year,

Samara 

Keeping with our theme of exploring power in the food system has writing this piece made you think about how power operates in this context, who sort of gets the right to assert an opinion or whose opinion gets heard? How are people on either side of the issue reflecting on whether they have power in this conversation or not?

Tamsin

Yeah, in a way, the way this conversation is carried out, it is all about power. This is the practitioners of Grindadráp on the one hand present this as they are members of a small community carrying out their traditional practice, and they are being attacked by enormously more populous, wealthy foreigners from around the world for just living the way they have always lived. So that is very much a story about being an embattled, disempowered, minority. On the other hand, I think that Sea Shepherd and other conservation groups like that would highlight, that they have no power whatsoever to change the law. That this is all down to the decisions of the Faroese people at the end of the day, all they're doing is journalistic work and reporting what's happening. They would also present it very much in terms of the sentient beings in this with the least power are the pilot whales and the Atlantic white-sided dolphins, which are the two main species taken, who have no power over their environment, which is being made more toxic and more dangerous by the year. Have no power over whether they are selected as a pod to be slaughtered or not, have no longer got any chance to escape that they would once have done because where once this was carried out on rowing boats with spears and ropes, it’s now carried out on motorboats. Yeah, so it's absolutely presented as being all about power on both sides. I don't know how helpful any of that framing is. In some ways, it seems to me that the power framing is the really polarized framing of this. And that has made me wonder about how do you know whether framing things in terms of power will illuminate who has power and isn't using it? And when is it just a way of everyone putting up walls around themselves and saying we need to defend ourselves?

Samara 

Power might just be its own power move.

Tamsin 

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, power is its own power move.

Samara 

As you're speaking, I can't help but thinking that people on either side of this debate are very much using framing from sustainable food, from alternative food movements in very different ways. tAnd I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.

Tamsin 

Yeah, that's, that's exactly how each side represent it. That in some sense, we're talking about a kind of hegemonic oppressive food system, that is harming someone and a different food system as a mode of resistance to it. In a way that like can hopefully can point towards the way that there are actually shared goals here. And that if the debate takes place in different terms, there are ways that different communities of activists or food system tos stakeholders can learn from each other. And one thing I'd say is that my from speaking to Sea Shepherd, they their goal is to try and move this into being a Faroese internal conversation. They, they hope one day to open a branch in the Faroe Islands, staffed entirely by local people, and pass the campaign entirely to that branch. So that then the conversation can - so it can take at least some of the power arguments out of it - and turn it into a conversation about the kind of shared or not shared goals

Matthew

In the beginning of our conversation, you identified Grindadráp as an interesting case study to explore big questions like what is animal sentience, where do older food traditions fit into the present, how does international media coverage impact local debates, and is this a sustainable practice? So after writing this piece, have you found greater clarity on some of those questions?  

Tamsin 

I think one of the things I realized is like, that we don't know the answer to a lot of these questions, and that our understanding is still developing, is gonna keep developing further. So on pilot whale sentience, suffering, social behavior, our understanding of all of those things has improved in the last five years. It’s improved a lot in the last 10 years, if we think that's relevant to the moral question of whether we should kill these animals? If so, how is it okay to do so, I think we can assume that will keep changing. The methods of killing these animals has changed in the last 20 years, towards being quicker and hopefully less cruel, but also in some ways, probably crueler, so the probably the mode of hunting has become crueler, and the mode of killing has become quicker and less cruel. So those are things that are also in flux in really recent time given the time depth of this tradition has. The health implications of eating this is changing. And then there are a bunch of things that I don't that I haven’t been able to find good information on. So how sustainable is this? How steady are these populations, the indications are relatively good, but there aren't very good studies? How much of this meat are people eating? I don't think the data is really there to make strong claims about that. So there are all sorts of ways in which I think like, lots of this is still up in the air. And changing the way we have a conversation could also allow people to study this better, and get a better understanding of all of it. (Yeah, very Table-y conclusion,) 

Matthew

Thank you for speaking with us Tamsin.

Tamsin 

Thanks for inviting me.

Matthew

That was Tamsin Blaxter, researcher and writer at TABLE and author of the upcoming publication - Parsing Grindadráp, which will be published on the TABLE website next week, t the end of June 2022. You can find the full piece, along with thousands of other food systems resources at tabledebates.org/ 

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This episode and was edited and mixed by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. We’ll be back to our conversations with people across the food system, interrogating how they view power in  and how they think it should change in our next episodes.

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