Sea Shepherd France: Fishermen carved homophobic slur into dolphin, conservationists say

Dolphins have been used to send odious messages to France Sea Shepherd. Photo / Supplied

A conservation group claims French fishermen carved a homophobic slur into a dolphin in a message to environmental campaigners.

Tensions between marine conservation group Sea Shepherd France and the French fishing industry have been escalating amid a row over sustainable fishing.

A war of words extended onto the body of a dolphin, which was recovered from the Bay of Biscay off the coast of the seaside town, Sables-d’Olonne in western France over the weekend.

Images and video posted online by Sea Shepherd France showed the dolphin’s skin mutilated to read a misspelt “Sea Sheperd”, and the French pejorative for gay men, “PD”.

“Fishermen send us one message by horribly mutilating one dolphin and scarifying its flesh ‘Sea Shepherd PD’,” Sea Shepherd France said. “What a shame for the whole profession on which they discredit.”

‘It’s a carnage’

A short video reveals the dolphin’s mutilated body aboard the group’s boat, with one activist saying: “I have no words.”

They add: “It’s a carnage ... we will not give up until there are concrete measures to save these dolphins.”

For the sixth winter in a row, the group has been patrolling French waters to document dolphin deaths as part of a public awareness campaign denouncing unintentional “bycatch” and unsustainable practices.

Saturday’s discovery is not the first time the group has been sent a hateful message via an odious act: in 2020, the group found a dolphin engraved with the message “Sea Shepherd F--k” also in the Vendée region.

Sea Shepherd France estimates that 10,000 dolphins are caught and killed in trawlers and fishing nets every year in France and has called on the government to close at-risk zones for four months to non-selective fishing gear, and to install cameras on fishing boats to determine the number of dolphin bycatch.

Though French fishermen are required by law to report the number of “accidental” dolphin catches, only 1.5 per cent of catches are declared, Sea Shepherd’s lawyer Jean Tamalet told France Info.

Mutilating and disembowelling the bodies of dead dolphins allows fishermen to sink and hide the evidence, the group says.

Hundreds of dead dolphins washed ashore

In January alone, six mutilated dolphins were found on French beaches. Since December, the bodies of 370 dead dolphins have washed ashore, while only 30 dolphins were reported as bycatch, the group says.

“The sea never stops rejecting the corpses of dolphins, captured by fishing gear. When the latter are mutilated, it is because they have either been consumed or the victims of an attempt to sink them to hide the evidence of capture,” president Lamya Essemlali said.

The group has also been critical of the government, accusing it of failing to protect the dolphins.

The state has already been condemned by the Paris administrative court for its delays in implementing concrete actions to save the dolphins from excess mortality in the Bay of Biscay, following a previous complaint by the NGO.

Sea Shepherd France has filed a new complaint and requested an investigation into identifying the fishermen who committed the “barbaric act” against a protected species. The group also exhibited the dolphin’s body to the public in the port of La Rochelle on the weekend to sensitise the public to their campaign.

“We will only be able to save the dolphins if public opinion massively seizes on this issue,” Essemlali has said previously in a press release. “We won’t get there any other way.”