Featured Image Credit: iWitness News
If you’ve ever been whale watching, you know how incredibly exciting it is to be out on the water, to see a majestic creature swim past you and perhaps be able to interact with it for a short time.
For the guests aboard a Thomson Cruise out of St. Vincent, the excitement ended in disaster and, well, downright horror, at the hands of a passing boat of whalers.
One of the crew aboard the tour boat, Ken Isaacs, shared that at first, they believed the cetacean that they’d spotted had been a pilot whale— a common sighting for the area— but on “closer examination of the animal’s back and dorsal fin, he realized that it was an orca.”
In all, the group was a pod of four that the tour was observing, until a small speedboat of about three fishermen chased the pod, and eventually shot a harpoon into an orca in front of the guests. Isaacs recalled that the boat had been told to turn around in the direction of another whale nearby, and that as the boat turned to face away, “there was a loud explosion as the spear was fired into the killer whale.”
The guests were mortified, even disturbed (and rightly so) by the events of watching this beautiful creature murdered before their eyes on what was supposed to be a fun, adventurous day out, to the point that Isaacs recalled “many of them were still crying as they arrived in Kingstown.”
Horrifically, this is actually an event that is legal and practiced in some places such as St. Vincent. Amazingly, activists continue to target SeaWorld and other AZA accredited zoos and aquariums, everyday, while they actually keep these types of animals safe, happy and away from harm.
Only one of these that groups actually needs to be united against and ended for the sake of our oceans and the species that live there, because while whaling is allowed to continue, the safety and well-being of our oceans can’t be ensured.
Until further notice, Thomson Cruise has cancelled bookings for their whale watching tours in St. Vincent.