1428 Dolphins Slaughtered in the Faroe Islands Sunday Night

So we cant eat meat, can't eat fish.... How about those poor veggies yanked from their habitat and thrown into boiling water. Who says it's right killing them?

The science says they are intelligent and able to communicate with each other.

Weird thing for me is the Faroe Islands always just seemed like such a quaint and unassuming place, nothing more than the whipping boys in the football qualifiers.

In this day and age I consider killing animals for sport just plain wrong. Whether that be bull fighting in Spain, hunting foxes, or this particularly barbaric incident in the Faroe Islands.

Killing animals for food is a totally different thing and even then it should be as humane as possible. I'm a meat eater but animal welfare is important.

There is a fungal and bacterial way network between plants by which information and nutrients are passed as needed.

You need to read up on soil health.

Perhaps the Danes should revive another old tradition of their glorious past, and send their navy to Ireland to kill lots of men, enslave and rape the remaining women and children and then sell them off in the middle East. Should be a good little earner.

I am entirely consistent; I don't kill and consume animals that I believe to be sentient and I certainly don't kill them because I have a tradition of doing it for fun or out of some baseless belief they are a threat to my having an adequate food source. The Egyptians employing cats to control mice I am perfectly OK with - the Japanese sacking and rape of Nanking; not so much. This incident is morally closer to the latter than the former.

"If all the whales/dolphins had been bred and killed for the purpose of the food supply then it would be tolerable."

Why would that make it any more tolerable? I don't see the argument there.

The wild salmon that lived its life in freedom had a much better quality of life than its farmed counterpart, until they suffered the same death and ended up on somebody's plate. What makes the killing and eating of a chicken bred for slaughter, and with a horrific quality of life from its first day to last day, more tolerable than the killing and eating of a wild chicken?

I'll agree with the idea that it's a needless and barbaric act, but I think those adjectives can be used to describe all meat production. I find it hard to identify how we produce our chicken and pork is really any less inhumane, and I think the arguments made as to how they are different don't really stand up to much scrutiny.

I was in a class with some students in Japan many years ago, and was having a discussion similar to this. I remember them being horrified to hear that we ate rabbits over here, and when I asked why that was any different to chicken or fish or any other animal, a girl of about 14 said 'But rabbits are cute."

I actually think that's very close to the truth on this issue. It's not really that some practices are really so much more barbaric or needless than others, it's just that we value some animals more highly than others, and cuteness or elegance has a lot to do with it.

It's certainly not the case that chickens don't have horrible lives before they die...it's just that we don't care about chickens that much, so their suffering is ok really.

Because doing something for the purpose of obtaining sustenance in order to survive is different.

We tolerate the practice of canines killing rabbits in the wild, it doesn't mean we'd let a pet dog attack a pet rabbit in the same way.

"Faroe Islands killed so many dolphins ‘they had to destroy their blubber"

They sure don't export dolphin meat to the EU and I doubt they eat 1,400 dolphins worth locally. They do have form for environmentally unsound practices. They were recently sanctioned by the EU for ditching fishing quotas for herring and mackrell.

"The European Commission adopted a package of trade sanctions against the Faroe Islands on Tuesday in a row over herring fisheries it says are being massively over-exploited.

"The EU is determined to use all the tools at its disposal to protect the long-term sustainability of stocks," said the EU's Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki." https://phys.org/news/2013-08-eu-sanctions-faroes-herring-spat.html

They sure don't need to kill dolphins to survive, they are doing deals to sell their huge catch of edible fish to Russia.

Hopefully the Danish government will withdraw the protection of it's navy or instigate some other sanctions to get these enviro-terrorists into line.

I mean breakfast rolls and ham sandwiches are our national dishes here in Ireland, maybe look into how pigs are reared in this country if you actually care about how animals are treated.