Eco-Nazis Wonder How To "Get Rid Of" Whale Carcasses

The language says it all; the callous indifference to the death of these beautiful, magnificent, complex, highly social and intelligent mammals washed ashore week after week upon British beaches. Not ‘why'? ‘how’? just ‘how the fuck do we get rid of their stinking corpses'?’

You’ve gotta read it to believe it. The actual Nazis had the same problem of course, which they solved with mass open graves and ovens running 24/7. The eco-Nazis have a bigger disposal problem: the victims of their eco-Holocaust, or environmental terrorism if you prefer, are very large, very conspicuous and they wash up unexpectedly and randomly on public beaches where thousands of tourists get to gawp at them for weeks on end. Not ideal. You can’t just quietly shove them into an open grave or a (very big) oven on your own private, fenced off and highly secure Concentration Camp, out of sight of prying eyes. It’s an altogether more pressing problem, even though the numbers (though increasing) are nowhere near those of the actual Holocaust. Having said that, Net Zero policies could eventually cost hundreds of millions of human lives. The Guardian spells out the predicament:

After a dead fin whale washed up on a beach in Newquay, Cornwall, this week, experts are now dealing with a logistical challenge: how do you get rid of a carcass weighing several tonnes? And what do you do if it explodes?

Hundreds of whales become stranded along the British coastline each year, and the numbers are rising. Since the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) was founded in 1990, it has recorded 17,850 cetacean strandings in the UK. There has been an unusually high number of whale strandings so far this year, including that of a pod of 55 pilot whales that washed up on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in July in one of the UK’s biggest mass strandings to date.

“When I started this job 25 years ago, you might be looking at 500 to 600 strandings a year, but now we are looking at 1,000,” said the CSIP project manager Rob Deaville, one of the experts who conducted postmortem examinations on July’s mass stranding.

The discovery of a stranded whale poses an array of problems for the local councils and organisations tasked with disposing of the carcass.

“Once on the shore a whale quickly decomposes and so can be a public health risk,” said Danny Groves, of the cetacean charity WDC. “There are significant hazards from bacteria and so people and pets should stay away. Often the beach site is disinfected after the removal operation.”

The financial and practical difficulties of moving a dead whale, which can weigh between 1 to 40 tonnes, are heightened by the potential for the decomposing carcass to become explosive.

“They can, in some cases, explode if left. as gases build up inside their bodies,” said Groves.

Last year a video posted on Youtube documented the grisly - and sudden - release of methane gas from a whale carcass that had been decomposing off the coast of Tomales Bay, California. Another video captured the loud sounds heard from two sperm whale explosions on the beach of Ameland island in the Netherlands in 1997.

The bloating stage of a cetacean’s decomposition is one of the main concerns when whales become stranded on the beaches of populated locations, and organisations have to work against the clock to avoid harm to members of the public.

Of course, the Guardian chooses to frame the problem in terms of a supposed public health risk, in particular the risk of a decaying whale exploding. But I’m not buying it. I think these eco-Holocaust deniers are far more concerned about the unwelcome public attention which the growing number of beached whale corpses is bringing. Why? Because actually, it’s probably more eco-friendly to allow a whale to naturally decompose on a beach and the probability of a corpse exploding is very small.

But in removing dead, stranded cetaceans like whales, dolphins and porpoises from beaches, we may be overlooking the several environmental benefits they offer, according to a study recently published in the journal Ecosystem Services.

Human societies historically viewed cetacean carcasses that washed ashore as important sources of food or as conduits for cultural and scientific knowledge — not as nuisances that must be removed, the study found. These benefits should prompt us to rethink how we manage beached carcasses today, Martina Quaggiotto, an ecologist at the University of Stirling, U.K., and lead author of the study, and her colleagues, argue.

The researchers compared all of the frequently used methods for managing stranded cetacean carcasses, and found that leaving a carcass where it lies to decompose naturally offers the greatest ecological benefits, from supporting scavengers to enhancing soil and water nutrients. It also costs the least. You don’t need big machinery, there’s no transportation involved, and the expenses are low, Quaggiotto said.

The researchers recommend leaving carcasses in place whenever possible, but they also acknowledge that this strategy could have undesirable social impacts. For example, rotting carcasses can attract sharks and feral dogs to the beach. Then there is the awful stench of rot. It can take from a few months to a few years for big carcasses to decompose completely on a beach; how long depends on factors such as the kinds of scavengers around and the temperature, rainfall and moisture, Quaggiotto said.

On the explosion issue:

Do whales often explode?

Such extreme cases of exploding whales are few and far between. Most scientists agree that whale explosions are unlikely. That’s because a dead whale’s skin will gradually form small tears, which will release some of the built-up gas. Whale explosions are more likely to happen if humans interfere with the corpse.

So fence off the carcass to discourage the public from interfering with it. Problem solved. Of course this does mean that the public will be looking at a dead whale for months on end, which is not good optics for the wind industry which is building ‘planet saving’ wind farms just offshore - totally coincidentally of course. The Guardian, even as it admits that whale strandings have doubled in the last 25 years and are extraordinarily high this year, does not question why and certainly does not dare to suggest that it may be wind farm development activity which is responsible, even though the evidence for that now is compelling. In fact, they are keen to deny that wind farms are responsible for cetacean deaths. Of course they are.