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The photographs displayed above were taken in 2005 and document a drive hunt (commonly known as a grind) of long-finned pilot whales by residents of the Faroe Islands (which are an autonomous province of Denmark), an activity that has long been a subject of international controversy. The whale hunt has been a part of the Faroe Island culture for hundreds of years, but in recent decades the practice has increasingly become the subject of international protest and condemnation. Supporters of the hunt maintain that the killing of pilot whales is an age-old communal, noncommercial hunt aimed at meeting the community's need for whale meat and blubber, that the animals are dealt with so quickly that their pain is brief, and that whale meat accounts for a quarter of the Faroe islanders' annual meat consumption. Conservationists charge that the hunts, which may take hundreds of whales at a time, are barbaric and pointless, that the practice is outdated, cruel and unnecessary for a place with one of the highest standards of living in Europe, and that most of the whales go to waste (either being left on the beach to rot or thrown back to sea after they are killed. According to Russell Fielding, a geographer from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee: A Faroe Islands whaling site page describes such hunts unfolding as follows: In 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) introduced zero catch limits for commercial whaling; however, the IWC's rules still allow for subsistence hunting in some parts of the world, and the application of their regulations to long-finned pilot whales is somewhat ambiguous since (despite their name) those animals are not whales proper; they are (like dolphins) small cetaceans, and they belong to the same biological family (Delphinidae) as dolphins. In late 2008, chief medical officers of the Faroe Islands advised that they no longer considered pilot whales to be fit for human consumption because the animals' meat and blubber had been found to contain too much mercury, PCBs and DDT derivatives. As noted above, the Faroe Islands are an autonomous province of Denmark and not a part of Denmark itself; essentially a self-governing country within the Kingdom of Denmark, with their own prime minister and legislature.
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