The Norwegian government killed a 1,300-pound walrus named Freya on Sunday who had spent the previous weeks off the coast of Oslo mountaineering onto boats and lounging on piers, announcing that shifting her was once “too high risk.”
“In the end, we couldn’t see any other options,” mentioned Olav Lekver, a spokesman for the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries. “She was in an area that wasn’t natural for her.”
Mr. Lekver mentioned walruses wanted a large number of leisure and other people have been bothering Freya by way of swimming together with her and taking footage of her. The Oslo Fjord is busy in summer season, with swimmers, boaters and different water recreationists. Walruses are social animals and seldom undertaking someplace by myself, which can have been why Freya had frolicked in a extremely populated space.
The directorate had time and again warned other people to keep away from the animal, however they most commonly didn’t concentrate, Mr. Lekver mentioned. The government warned final week that Freya confronted the possibility of being killed if they might no longer persuade onlookers to stick away.
Freya become a risk to human protection, Mr. Lekver mentioned, including, “She chased people on paddle boards and kayaks.”
He didn’t specify how Freya was once killed, however mentioned it was once “according to regulations.”
Freya was once noticed off the coasts of Britain and quite a lot of European nations, together with the Netherlands and Denmark, for a minimum of two years.
There are kind of 225,000 walruses within the wild, in keeping with the World Wide Fund for Nature. They reside in ice-covered waters in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and Alaska.
In their standard habitat, walruses haul themselves onto sheets of ice. In the case of Freya, she was once hauling herself onto piers and boats. Some ice sheets are melting as a result of local weather alternate, inflicting walruses to lose a few of their habitat.
“Many other options should’ve been tried before killing her,” mentioned Rune Aae, a biologist on the University of South-Eastern Norway who have been monitoring Freya’s motion on a Google map to lend a hand other people know when to keep away from her. In a Facebook put up on Sunday, he known as the verdict to kill her “too hasty.”
“Freya had sooner or later gotten out of the Oslofjord, which all previous experience has shown, so euthanasia was, in my view, completely unnecessary,” he wrote.
