Around 40 whales euthanised after they returned to beach

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The remainder of a pod of 97 Pilot whales have been euthanised after a failed rescue mission on Western Australia’s south coast. The mass stranding at Cheynes beach east of Albany began on Tuesday afternoon.

Transcript

00:00 Today, efforts at Chains Beach, east of Albany, are focused on cleaning up and taking samples

00:07 from the whales which beached themselves again yesterday evening.

00:12 Now, on Monday, we saw that these whales were behaving quite strangely off the coast of

00:18 Chains, and the next day they beached themselves, despite the best efforts of rescuers who herded

00:26 them together into a pod and tried to push them out together into deeper water.

00:31 They restranded themselves again before sunset yesterday, and the very difficult decision

00:36 was made that the most humane thing to do would be to euthanise the animals.

00:42 The Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions, Peter Hartley, said it was

00:47 one of the most difficult decisions of his career, and it was understandably difficult

00:51 for everybody who was involved, who'd been working throughout the day, throughout the

00:56 night, to try and give these animals the best chance of survival.

01:01 We know that whale strandings are a natural phenomenon, but we gave it a good go, spending

01:07 the whole day in the water with those animals to give them the best opportunity.

01:11 So, yeah, very hard to see, but this is nature, and it's a natural phenomenon.

01:16 So today the bodies will be moved away and buried after samples are taken for scientific

01:22 research, and the hope is that that might provide some answers as to why pilot whales

01:27 strand themselves, and just kind of close that gap in knowledge for future rescue efforts.

01:34 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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