What about on island connectivity, mainly wireless, or are your lines (especially on the remote islands) good enough for DSL?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FARICE-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHEFA-2
Prices of one of the major ISPs: https://www.ft.fo/ver/breidband/
50/10 - 487 dkk, 65.42 euro, 76.29 usd
75/10 - 497 dkk, 66.76 euro, 77.86 usd
100/20 - 527 dkk, 70.79 euro, 82.56 usd
And the other: https://hey.fo/internet/heimanet/breidband/
Although where there's fibre to a large apartment building, it can be half the typical rate.
The Islands and the Whales (2016)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5746140/
trailer
Physical pain perhaps - I'd imagine the herding onto the beach still involves a fair amount of terror for the poor beasts.
Also I'm not sure I buy the either/or rationalisation presented. No doubt there are other ways to provide enough calories that might even lead to new exports.
Thankfully most of the world views whaling as a shameful throwback to less enlightened times; I look forward to the days when the remaining holdouts see the light.
This is a very easy statement to make if you're not planning on providing any examples. I did. We can import the food. In my view, this is a worse solution than the current one.
If you have an idea for how to increase local Faroese food production enough to completely offset the energy obtained from whale meat, you should consider coming here to teach us.
I don't accept that every possible other option that the universe offers has been exhausted, which seems to be your position.
I'm not suggesting you drink the Gin to replace the calories in case this isn't clear - more exports would enable more imports.
We do, after all, kill other mammals for food which -if one can use such a word- intellectually are at least on par with the whale species hunted without much by way of outrage from the public.
So - what is so special about the whales?
(Full disclosure - Norwegian, we also hunt whales; while whale meat is by no means an everyday occurrence, I tend to eat it 4-5 times a year, which probably is above the national average)
Sentience would make me wary about hunting them, but as far as I can tell, no such claim has been made about minkes, which are the whales hunted locally.
The problem, by the way, with such an argument as you're presenting is basically that it leaves us to choose an arbitrary cutoff point. Which species are intelligent enough to warrant not being hunted for food? Why at that precise point? How about an unusually bright specimen of the first species deemed dumb enough to hunt?
Basically, the only safe conclusion would be to go vegan. (Which I can see valid arguments for, though they haven't as of yet convinced me.)
Here is a table from 2000 to 2017
http://www.whaling.fo/en/regulated/450-years-of-statistics/c...
As you can see, it varies wildly, going from zero some years to around 1,500 some years.
An average mass for a pilot whale might be 1300 kg, of which perhaps half is edible [4].
That means 275 whales is more than enough, yet over double that is caught in the average year.
Presumably, many people aren't bothered by the toxins.
[1] http://www.whaling.fo/media/1043/hfs-uk_0.pdf
[2] I'm ignoring children, pregnant women etc, who have a lower/nil recommendation, so this estimate is an overestimate
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_whale#Description
[4] http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/livestock/beef/facts/05-... or http://www.icrwhale.org/pdf/SC004184-209.pdf since I can't see how much meat + blubber there is on a pilot whale
As you might imagine, Faroese people have a tendency to get quite defensive when this subject comes up. In my opinion, this mostly comes from the fact that most of the critique is based on misinformation.
First of all, I should point out that the whale slaughter is not purely a tradition. It's not like fox hunting or bullfighting, which is are mainly done for entertainment and other non-essential reasons. The whale hunt accounts for a significant portion of the meat consumed in the country. The only other locally sourced meat is sheep and fish. Everything else needs to be imported. The whale hunt is not for fun or for entertainment. It is for food. Is it possible to survive without it? Sure, but then those missing calories will need to be imported, causing damage to the environment and also acting as drain on the already vulnerable economy.
The Faroes are largely supported by fishing, and most families own a modern boat. If we for some reason had to do the whaling with traditional wooden boats, then we'd all need to own two boats. Not only that, but the hunt would become much more dangerous and risky for no practical reason.
That said, the boats are probably not used for hunting like you imagine it. They are used to herd the whales onto the beach where they are killed using pretty traditional means. This part of the hunt has also diverged from the old days though, and I would definitely say for the better. Originally, the whales were killed by slicing their throats, letting them bleed out. These days doing it like that is illegal. We have developed a new spear-like tool, which makes it easy to sever the spinal cord in a single blow, instantly killing the whales. This eliminates the most painful part for the animal.
The whale drives are a communal effort to provide food for the entire community, not a "manhood tradition", as often depicted in the media. I can tell you one thing for certain - if people stopped caring about eating whales, the tradition would also stop.