Many people denounced the decision as a national shame. Some raised questions about why authorities didn’t attempt to move the walrus to a safer area or wait for her to leave on her own once summer crowds dispersed..
A fundraising campaign has been launched to build a statue in memory of Freya, a 1,300-pound walrus euthanized this week by Norwegian authorities, who said she was a threat to human safety.
The young female walrus — nicknamed after the Norse goddess of beauty and love — had been making a splash in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, since mid-July, napping on boats and sunbathing on piers.
Officials decided to euthanize the walrus in the early hours of Sunday local time after the public ignored repeated warnings to keep their distance from her. Authorities had considered relocating the walrus but ultimately decided the operation was too risky. Marine experts say there’s a chance a sedated marine mammal could drown.
Many people denounced the decision as a national shame. Some raised questions about why authorities didn’t attempt to move the walrus to a safer area or wait for her to leave on her own once summer crowds dispersed.
Freya’s death “has a strong negative signal effect that we in Norway, and especially Oslo, are not able to provide living space for wild animals,” Erik Holm, the organizer of the fundraiser, wrote in his appeal.
“By erecting a statue of the symbol Freya quickly became, we will always remind ourselves (and future generations) that we cannot or should not always kill and remove nature when it is ‘in the way,’ ” Holm added.
In an email, Holm — a Norway-based founder of digital start-ups — said he hates it when people say “that’s just the way it is” when things can be done better.
Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store this week defended the decision, telling national broadcaster NRK that as a seafaring nation “sometimes we have to make unpopular decisions.” He added that he’d had similar discussions about euthanizing minke whales and seals.
The campaign had raised more than $20,000 as of Wednesday, and Holm said several sculptors had expressed interest in creating the statue. Donations came mostly from Norway but also from as far away as the United States, he said. In the event that the project does not move ahead, any donations will go to the Norwegian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, he said.
City officials in Oslo, responding to a query on whether they would support placing the statue in a public place, said the statue is a “private initiative, and the municipality has nothing to do with this.”
Walruses normally live in the ice-covered waters of Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and Alaska. There are approximately 25,000 Atlantic walruses and 200,000 Pacific walruses in the wild. They typically rest on sea ice between feeding bouts.
However, climate change is increasingly driving animals far from their natural habitats. A beluga whale trapped in a river northwest of Paris, far from its home in the Arctic, died this month as rescuers attempted to get the 13-foot mammal back to the coast.
