It is unknown, then, to note that a campaign was launched last week to erect a statue of Freya. Her photos already seem to have a noble, if not regal, aspect to her unexpected surroundings. These images of literal disconnection and appropriation seem to evoke the current state of affairs for marine mammals. Outrage greeted the ‘euthanasia’ of Freya in Oslo’s fjord – she was shot to protect swimmers who had defied warnings not to approach her – following a bad summer for the sea-borne animals. Freya’s death came just weeks after another hippo, named Mursu, ended up on grass in someone’s garden in southern Finland. Mursu’s sudden death last month was blamed by some observers on a failed and delayed effort to save the animal from its plight. Days later, three Sowerby’s beaked whales – among the deepest diving and most enigmatic of all cetaceans – washed up on a Dutch beach. The setting was almost medieval: as some sailors tried to lead the whales back to sea, a topless woman in a sunbath climbed onto one of the animals and tried to ride it. In the past 12 days, seven of the same species have been found dead in the Moray Firth, County Durham in Denmark, Belgium and the Dutch island of Texel, raising serious concerns that military sonar exercises may be to blame. Albrecht Dürer’s the Head of a Walrus, 1521. Photo: Artefact/Alamy Earlier this month a four-metre beluga whale was fished out of the Seine in Normandy. The emaciated whale, its pale skin mottled as a sign of its weakened immune system, was euthanized while brought to shore. Meanwhile, late last month, 99 bottlenose dolphins were driven into a bay in the Faroe Islands and slaughtered for their meat. It was the biggest such hunt in 120 years: harrowing images showed the animals sliced up like so much sushi. And this summer Iceland resumed hunting fin whales, the second largest animals on earth. Norway has never stopped whaling, despite an international moratorium on whaling implemented in 1986. The most important stories on the planet. Get all the week’s environmental news – the good, the bad and the must-haves Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The decline of modern tastes for whale meat may herald the death of whaling, but the evidence suggests that we simply don’t know how to deal with these deceptive animals, dead or alive. Marine mammals are often euthanized with pentobarbital, a chemical that renders corpses toxic: in 2011 in the US, a dog fell into a coma after digging up pieces of a buried whale. Now modern conservationists are pleading with the authorities not to drag dead whales to landfill, but to leave them on the shore to sustain the foraging animals and thus complete a natural cycle. Engraving by Jan Saenredam of a crowd around a beached whale in 1601 in the Netherlands. Photograph: Alamy In a recent and revealing article for Nautilus magazine, American environmentalist Ben Goldfarb notes that a minke whale that washed up on a Dutch islet was visited by 57 species of beetles. In Russia, scientists documented 180 polar bears feeding on a whale carcass. Such resources can mean life or death for animals whose environments are increasingly stressed by the climate emergency. In the sea, whales are highly efficient carbon sequesters: alive, their feces fertilize phytoplankton. in death, their bodies sustain colonies of organisms on the sea floor. However, on land we deny them this service, treating their remains as noisy litter. Dead whales sure stink. after an encounter with a dead mink on Skegness beach, I had to throw away most of the clothes I was wearing. But while a mass of rotting mud wouldn’t go down well on the golden sands of Bournemouth, remote beaches are a different matter. “We are removing what is natural from a natural place,” said Martina Quaggiotto, an ecologist at the University of Stirling. “We dispose of dead whales not just because they smell,” adds Goldfarb, “but to escape the evidence of our sins.” Human hubris goes on its own when it comes to our interactions with the natural world. It always has. Dürer himself died of an infection caught in the Netherlands when he tried to draw a stranded whale in 1521. It was probably malaria, from the marshes of Zeeland. but the artist himself felt that he had paid the price for his impossible arrogance in trying to capture Leviathan. In 1803, William Blake, who respected Dürer, would declare of a world already out of relation to nature: “We are led to believe a lie/When we see not through the eye.” Sometimes just bearing witness and leaving well alone is the best we can do. Perhaps Freya should have been warned when she was given her human name. Freya was not only the mythological Norse goddess of love. She was also the goddess of the dead.
