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Displaying items by tag: Hunting

The Faroe Islands has announced it will limit its controversial dolphin unit to 500 for this year and next, as RTÉ News reports.

The decision comes after a Faroese governmental review prompted by a petition calling for a ban on the bloody hunt tradition that garnered 1.3 million signatures.

Almost 1,500 white-sided dolphins were killed in last year’s hunt, which employs a method known as “grindadráp” whereby boats surround cetaceans in a semi-circle to drive them into shallows where they are then beached and slaughtered with knives.

The traditional hunt has wide support in the Faroes, part of the Kingdom of Denmark and some 320km north of the Scottish mainland, where dolphins and pilot whales have fed communities for generations. Local leaders emphasised that the annual catch is “important supplement to the livelihoods of Faroe Islanders”.

RTÉ News has more on the story HERE.

Published in Marine Wildlife

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.