The Faroe Islands limit their hunting quota to 500 dolphins per year

A quantified measure for a very controversial practice. The Faroe Islands announced on Sunday July 10 that they were going to temporarily limit the number of dolphins that its inhabitants hunt to 500 per year. “An annual catch limit of 500 white-sided dolphins has now been proposed by the Department of Fisheries on a provisional basis for 2022 and 2023”said the government of this Danish autonomous territory.

This quota was set after the “unusually large catch” of 1,423 white-sided dolphins last September, the government said in a statement. “Aspects of this catch were unsatisfactory, in particular the unusually high number of dolphins killed”he acknowledged, adding: “This is unlikely to be a sustainable catch level (…) in the long term.”

A review of the practice was launched in February after a petition calling for a ban on this traditional hunt was submitted to the Faroese government. The text had collected nearly 1.3 million signatures.

The government stressed on Sunday that the captures were a “important supplement to the livelihoods of the people of the Faroe Islands”. He also felt that the capture of dolphins was done in a manner “sustainable” for the environment.

Given current stocks, the government has stated that an annual quota of around 825 dolphins would be “well below sustainable limits”, but recommended 500 as an interim limit. After the opinion of the scientific committee of the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, expected for 2024, it will re-examine the provisional quota.

The government said it would also assess the procedures used to kill the dolphins. In the Faroese tradition, hunters surround the dolphins with a wide semi-circle of fishing boats and lead them into a shallow bay where they are stranded. The fishermen on the shore then kill the cetaceans with knives.