> 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.

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.

The Netherlands seem to be the experts on agricultural innovation. Apart from that I can imagine that the wild pristine environment etc would be a powerful marketing angle for artisanal/organic products of various types. Faroese Gin flavoured with local botanicals and made with pure local spring water? Finest Faroese beef? There's a huge market for this kind of stuff and people love to boast about having tried it, and often the rarer and more obscure the better.

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.

At the risk of opening a can of worms, what is it really about whaling which makes it so much worse than other forms of hunting?

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)

Cetaceans are highly intelligent, supposedly more so than other mammals that we eat, which I think counts for something. If not, why stop at whales? Why not primates? Why not other humans? Have I made my point?

-As far as I can tell, most research indicates that dolphins and orcas are, as such things go, pretty bright, perhaps even sentient.

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.)

That point seems to go both ways.