The Difficult Decision: Euthanasia for Stranded Whales in New Zealand
When it comes to saving stranded whales, everyone wants a Disney ending. Research shows that desire can make animals suffer.
It takes a day for Hori Parata (Ngātiwai) to dissect a whale. His tipuna have been doing this work for some 15 generations, and now his son does too.
"We're doing it because it's a retrieval of important resources from the whale," he says. "It's whale oil and bone that we're using as a remedy for kauri dieback."
But well before Parata turns up, there's likely to be a crowd on the beach. The process of saving a whale, whether in a single stranding or a mass stranding, is a mammoth effort.
The response will often include local iwi, DoC, Project Jonah volunteers and staff as well as researchers. There's also a global roster of experts to call via WhatsApp for help assessing whales' health.
Project Jonah NZ's general manager Daren Grover explains that it's usually a member of the public on an early morning walk who finds a stranded whale or pod. Over the past 30 years, Project Jonah has trained thousands of volunteer 'marine mammal medics' around the country, and these are the people who will show up to help. Grover says the protocol is to keep the whales "cool, comfortable, and calm".
The marine mammal medics have stayed busy this summer, especially in Golden Bay. New Zealand is a hotspot for whale strandings, with one of the longest coastlines in the world, and Farewell Spit specifically is a 'whale magnet' - in January, there were three mass strandings, with a total of more than 60 whales.
While whales can survive on the beach for several days, Grover says what's most likely to kill a healthy whale is stress, from overheating or from predators - like seagulls pecking at them.
In these recent strandings in Golden Bay, more than half died, some by euthanasia.
Massey University's Karen Stockin researches strandings. Some of her work involves using AI to help track whales post-stranding to see if they're able to dive deep enough to forage for food. It's important knowledge because when whales strand, are refloated, and then strand again, the people working to save them need to monitor their health to make sure they're well enough to be put back in the ocean. She compares it to how humans returning from sea can get landsick.
"When refloating them, if they've been literally on the hard substrate on the beach ... it can take a number of hours for them to really equilibrise and stabilise themselves.
"We don't want to be refloating whales that we find later are somehow compromised, that re-strand because they haven't been able to successfully feed."
Stockin says that sometimes healthy whales are also not good candidates for refloating. She gives the example of a baby whale still nursing, but whose mother has died.
"In essence you're potentially causing more distress to an animal by giving it a prolonged death."
But, she says, this is often unpalatable to the public, and even to those who've been trying to save the animal.
Stockin also researches the human psychology behind saving marine mammals.
"We have shown that sometimes our human desire to save all the animals ... to make ourselves feel better, that we were willing sometimes to push back animals before we've clearly identified they are actually well enough to save," she says.
In those cases, euthanasia might be the 'kinder' option.
In today's episode of The Detail, we look at the tricky topic of euthanising a whale, what happens when a whale is dissected on the beach, and how stranded whales are helping science.