After a boat trip to Iceland’s new whale sanctuary, tourists will be able to hop off for lunch at a harbourside restaurant where the most popular menu item is whale steak in béarnaise sauce.
Iceland’s double standards were exposed yesterday at the launch of a scheme to provide a seaside retirement home for performing whales.
The Icelandic government approved the sanctuary but last week resumed whaling after a gap of three years, with a ship landing a 20m fin whale at a port on the country’s west coast. Iceland has granted itself a quota for this year of up to 238 fin whales, which are an endangered species.
However, Katrin Jakobsdottir, Iceland’s new “Left-Green” prime minister, has promised a review of whaling this autumn amid hopes that the sanctuary will attract more tourists who want to see whales rather than eat them.
Merlin Entertainments, owner of Legoland, Alton Towers and Madame Tussauds, said yesterday that it would fly two beluga whales 6,000 miles from its aquarium in Shanghai to Reykjavik next spring.
The 12-year-old whales, which can live to 60 in the wild but tend to die in their twenties in aquariums, will spend the rest of their lives in a netted-off section of a sheltered bay on Heimay, an island off Iceland’s south coast.
Merlin is paying several million pounds toward the cost of the sanctuary, which will also be funded by tourists paying for boat trips to see the whales.
Cathy Williamson, captivity campaign manager at Whale and Dolphin Conservation, a charity working with Merlin to create the sanctuary, said there had been a big drop in public support in Iceland for whale hunting. A poll in 2013 found that 60 per cent of Icelanders supported whaling but this fell to 34 per cent in last month’s poll.
Ms Williamson said: “A lot of whale meat is eaten by tourists but that’s also on the wane. We are hoping that [the sanctuary] will encourage a love of whales in Iceland as opposed to the small number of people who are still involved in killing them.”
Sally Hamilton, chief executive of Orca, another whale protection charity, said: “The contradiction of a progressive, cosmopolitan society like Iceland supporting the slaughter of whales whilst creating an innovative new sanctuary for them shows how much this practice conflicts with modern-day thinking.”
Clare Perry, of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a charity investigating wildlife crimes and abuses, said the creation of the sanctuary “further isolates the fin whale hunt as an outdated, unpopular and unnecessary activity”. She added: “Iceland has a vibrant and growing whale watching industry and a strong international reputation for environmental protection. It’s time to apply that across the board and bring an end to commercial whaling.”
The sanctuary has room for at least another eight beluga whales and WDC will now seek to persuade other aquariums, including Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Sea World San Antonio, Texas, to retire their belugas to Iceland.
