Over 1,400 dolphins slaughtered in Denmark in a gory hunt

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<strong>As many as 1,400 white-sided dolphins were killed in a day as part of a gory hunting ritual in the Faroe Islands, an autonomous Danish territory, sparking an outrage on social media on Tuesday.</strong></p>
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Photos showed the heartrending sight of hundreds of Atlantic white-sided dolphins lying slaughtered on the beach.</p>
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Sea Shepherd, a charity that campaigns against the hunting of whales and dolphins, described it as a "barbaric practice".</p>
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"There is no doubt that the Faroese whale hunts are a dramatic sight to people unfamiliar to the hunts and slaughter of mammals," AFP news agency cited a spokesman of the Faroe Islands government as saying.</p>
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"The hunts are, nevertheless, well organised and fully regulated," he said.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://www.indianarrative.com/upload/news/Killing_Of_Dolphins_In_Faroe_Islands2.jpg" style="width: 1024px; height: 768px;" /></p>
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Traditionally, the North Atlantic islands — which have a population of around 50,000 people — hunt pilot whales and not dolphins, the spokesman said.</p>
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"There are usually a few of them in the 'grind', but we normally don't kill such a large number," said a local television journalist, Hallur av Rana.</p>
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The "grindadrap" is a practice whereby the hunters first surround the whales with a wide semi-circle of fishing boats and then drive them into a bay to be beached and slaughtered.</p>
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"It looks quite extreme and it took some time to kill them all, while it's usually pretty quick," av Rana said.</p>
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According to av Rana, although some 53 percent of the islands' population are opposed to the "grind", there no plans to abolish the practice. The authorities insist it is a sustainable way of hunting.</p>