Stacey Dooley Meets Our Crew While Investigating Whaling in the Faroe Islands

English television presenter, journalist and documentary filmmaker Stacey Dooley MBE met our crew during her latest documentary, Stacey Dooley Investigates: The Whale Hunters, while researching the hunting of pilot whales and dolphins in the Faroe Islands.

Our charity (then operating as Sea Shepherd UK, alongside the wider Sea Shepherd movement founded by Captain Paul Watson) has been leading the opposition to the grindadráp — or 'grind', as the hunts are locally known — since the early 1980s. 2019 saw our crew living in the Faroe Islands for our eleventh year of campaigning against the hunts, as part of Operation Bloody Fjords.

Dooley met with our volunteers, who come from all over the world and aim to bring to light what is happening by sharing images on social media and livestreaming the hunts. Footage from one of the livestreams showed the attempted slaughter of a dolphin with a spinal lance (a tool specifically designed to kill pilot whales and dolphins). When the dolphin didn't immediately die, a knife was used to kill the mammal. Other volunteer footage showed a pilot whale suffering a similar fate.

Dooley met with Kate Sanderson, an advisor to the Faroese government on responsible hunting, to put forward the argument that — despite all the research to the contrary — the whales and dolphins in the grind often don't die quickly, and do suffer. Her concern was that this suffering isn't monitored, and she showed Sanderson our footage to confirm her argument. Sanderson conceded that "it is a slaughter of wild animals in an uncontrolled environment, so it's never going to be completely clinical."

Dooley concluded the documentary stating that whale hunting is an emotive topic because it involves people's traditions and beliefs, but admitted that she didn't agree with the suffering of these animals. She revealed that the Faroese government had written to her to inform her that they are developing a smaller spinal lance for dolphins.

"We worked with the producers of this documentary in terms of giving them some background to the whaling season and what to expect, but had no input whatsoever to the content. To see Stacey's genuine reaction when witnessing the killing of a dolphin said it all for me. Not to mention the fact that there is plenty of research pointing towards the fact that the consumption of whale meat exposes people to high levels of heavy metal and industrial pollutant poisoning — which wasn't covered in the programme." — Rob Read, Chief Operating Officer