The Icelandic man responsible for the killing a huge blue whale hybrid has vowed to carry on killing whales.
Kristjan Loftsson is a millionaire whaling magnate, and he obviously has no hard feelings about having killed and butchered the rare fin whale/blue whale hybrid just over a week ago.
The 67-foot long whale would have been decades old when it was harpooned to death by whalers working at the orders of Loftsson. It was then taken back to the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, where it was skinned, flayed, and rendered into huge chunks of whale meat by a machine.
After that, its bones, blubber, and innards were left to rot on the quayside, or to be eaten by the birds.
That's not exactly a dignified way for a beautiful, peaceful creature to die - if it had to die at all.
Photos then emerged of Loftsson supervising the 'processing' of a fin whale. Despite pretty much everyone at home and abroad criticising him for his action, Loftsson seemed supremely unmoved by the anger he was attracting.
In fact, after he was forced to stop whaling for two years because of poor trading conditions, the Mirror reports that he has now said that he will continue to hunt another 150 whales this summer.
Ships from his company, Hvalur HF, will take to the seas in international waters in order to meet this quota.
The trade of whale meat between countries is currently banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. However, more than 8,800 tonnes of whale meat and blubber were imported into Japan last year alone.
Obviously, criticism is not something that Loftsson allows to get to him. Particularly from international governing bodies.
To be fair, it's working for him. He's worth millions and recently made another £150m from selling off part of his company.
Despite that, conservationists are still calling for action after the hybrid whale was killed. According the International Fund for Animal Welfare, hybrid whales - because they are so rare - are protected by international conventions.
Sigursteinn Masson, from Iceland's branch of the IFAW, said: "The killing of a blue-fin whale hybrid demonstrates the difficulty for whalers at sea to identify which species they are pursuing.
"The result is that a rare and protected species has suffered as collateral damage from a cruel, unnecessary and increasingly unpopular hunt.
"Now that the evidence has been confirmed, we once again call for an immediate and permanent end to this whaling to prevent further harm to these endangered species, which not only play a crucial role within the marine ecosystem, but also embody such a rich national and cultural heritage as well."
A recent study showed that last year only 1 per cent of Icelandic people ate whale meat, and over 80 percent had never tried it.
Featured Image Credit: RUV/Sea Shepherd Global