Speaking of Whales, this is what it looks like to butcher a rotting Blue Whale. Warning, some graphic photos below.

In Newfoundland, Canada...

Last winter was an extra cold one in Newfoundland, Canada, where my family lives. Snow drifts were reaching people's roofs, snow banks were making roads look more like tunnels and there was extra ice in the seas surrounding Newfoundland. Sometime in the late winter, two Blue Whales, each about 60 000 kg, became trapped in thick ice near Newfoundland's west coast and drowned.

Of these whales washed up in the town neighboring my home town, Trout River. The whale was so big, my camera phone couldn't fit the whole thing in a picture from the beach. It was about 30 m long.

Head

photo credit:me

Tail

photo credit:me

Trout river is a town of about 1000, almost all of which live within 500m of the whale. The usual problem with 60 000 kg of meat is that it starts to smell. While there was a smell, the weather was still cool and the majority of the gases were remaining trapped in the whale. The fear was now the whale was going to explode, covering the tiny town with stinking whale shrapnel. The bigger risk was probably that it explodes right in someones face. As you can see from marks on the whale in the the photos above, brave residents were poking, prodding and cutting at the carcass. One of the flippers even disappeared to a fine fellow and his chainsaw. Then people started climbing on the belly to take pictures, extra risky as you are pretty much guaranteed to drown in a pile of rotten innards in the skin gave way.

Something about the potentially exploding whale caught the eye of the world. This tiny corner of Newfoundland was famous for a day or so. Canadian and international news crews (I saw CBC and the Discover channel) started arriving to follow the story of the explosive whale.

We were in the Guardian. This is what it looked like when it still had the potential to explode.

After gases had slowly leaked out of the whale, looking pretty flat.

photo credit:me

I can see why the film crews were there, if they caught the explosion on video...it might look something like this.

(SUPER GRAPHIC)

To the disappointment of the world, the whale deflated slowly. The problem of the rotting whale persisted. A few parties spoke up asking for the whale, offering to remove the stinking mammal if they could keep the skeleton . The Royal Ontario Museum won the right to the carcass. The plan was to tow it by water to our local boat ramp, then start removing the flesh by hand and ship the bones to Ontario, Canada.

The crew was a handful of museum employees and local residents. They had massive flensing (blubber removing) knives, but most of the work was just hacking at massive chunks of flesh with kitchen knives. Amazingly this only took then 10 days or so to get through the whole animal. The smell was very fatty and rancid, slightly fishy and very rotten. The butchers all said after the first hour or so of butchering, you didn't notice, until you open up an extra rotten big or internal organ.

Half butchered, they started on the tail end.

I shot this video of the whale half butchered, with the spine mostly in tact.

All of the meat was buried, the bones were shipped to Ontario where they were buried under a mix of manure and saw dust in order to promote further breakdown of the organic material left on the bones. When the bones are uncovered, they are going to eventually be put on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.