Týr’s Heri Joensen Met by Anti-Whaling Protestors Outside Portland, OR Show

Týr’s Heri Joensen has once again found himself under attack for participating in the whale hunting rituals of his native Faroe Islands.

Before the band’s show on May 17th (last Thursday night) in Portland, OR, protestors stood outside the Hawthorne Theatre holding up signs that read “Whale killers not welcome here,” “Tyr = cowards,” “Real musicians don’t kill whales in spare time” and other slogans, according to a quick video clip posted on Tyr’s Facebook page (embedded below). Comments on the Facebook thread suggest there have been protestors in other cities, too, including the May 9th date in Toronto.

This isn’t the first time Joensen has come under fire for his participation in his country’s whale hunt. In 2016 he posted a photo of the butchering process following a hunt (Joensen himself only helps with this part in exchange for some of the meat, and doesn’t go out on the water to hunt himself) which sparked an uproar, to which Joensen issued a very thoughtful, well-articulated video in response.

Joensen’s defense of his participation in the hunt is nuanced, but some of the key points he mentioned include: 1) commercial meat farming and consumption the world over (beef, pork, foul, etc.) is way more brutal in nature, cruel to the animals and devastating to the environment, 2) the pilot whales the Faroese hunt are far from endangered, and all hunting is done in accordance with strict regulations designed to keep it that way, 3) the Faroese whale hunt is solely for consumption of the meat by people on the island; it’s an important local source of food in an isolated island nation where most things need to be imported at great expense.

Joensen hasn’t commented on this latest round of protestors other than a quick quip on the above-mentioned Facebook post to say the show went on as planned, but if he did, I’d imagine it’d be a whole lot like the video he posted in 2016. I highly encourage you to watch that regardless of which side of this particular issue you fall on, so I’ll post that below.

Thanks: MS reader Emily