The most ambitious and final rescue attempt began on 28 April. Timmy was loaded into a water-filled transport barge for a journey toward the North Sea. Experts warned that the metal walls would reflect the whale’s sonar, causing extreme stress. Drone footage later confirmed that Timmy was thrashing against the sides. The plan was to release the whale in open water. Instead, he was dropped 70 kilometres north of Skagen, Denmark – directly into a busy shipping lane.
The International Whaling Commission had already described the operation as “inadvisable,” noting that the juvenile appeared “severely compromised” and was unlikely to survive. Burkard Baschek, Director of the Ocean Museum Germany, had warned that the rescue amounted to “pure animal cruelty.” Those warnings went unheeded.
After release, Timmy was reported to be blowing through his blowhole and swimming in what observers called the right direction. The tracker fitted to monitor his progress was not working. Two weeks later, a whale was found dead near the small Danish island of Anholt in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden.
Danish authorities said they had no plans to remove the carcass or conduct a post-mortem, and urged the public to stay away from the remains due to the risk of disease.
The two financiers behind the operation have attempted to distance themselves from the manner of the release, issuing a joint statement calling for consequences to be borne “by the owner, the operators, and any crew members of the ships Fortuna B and Robin Hood.”
A petition demanding accountability for the rescue’s failures has been circulating online, while questions continue to be raised over the secrecy of the tracking data and the handling of the whale during transport.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Fabian Ritter, a marine biologist and whale researcher at M.E.E.R.
For those in the conservation community, the spectacle of Timmy’s rescue – and death – has drawn attention to a deeper and more troubling failure.
“It’s really striking that there’s been such a focus on this individual animal at such great cost during a time of great crisis for wildlife funding around the world,” Amy Dickham, Professor of Wildlife Conservation at the University of Oxford, told The Guardian.
“It’s really questionable whether it was a good use of funds, particularly compared with issues that impact much greater numbers of whales, such as collisions with vessels and entanglements with fishing gear.”
