Whales Breathe Life Into Quebec's North Shore

Photograph by : MATT LOW AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

From The Montreal Gazette:

Story Byin the 1920s, the Canadian Government Declared War on the Belugas of the St. Lawrence Estuary and introduced a $15 bounty to anyone who would bring in the flukes of the small white whale.

This was a bid by fishery officials to protect fish stocks by culling the whales, which were wrongly blamed for plummeting catches by the local commercial fishery.

The government went as far as to provide a First World War ace pilot with funding and dynamite to fly over and drop homemade bombs on the pods of belugas. During the Second World War, Canadian pilots sometimes used belugas as target practice because they were so easy to spot.

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