Dead Whales and Disturbing Behaviour

It’s certainly a sad sight when a pod of disorientated whales loses its way, runs aground and most of the whales die slowly on the beach, as has happened recently in several isolated places.
Those good souls who work to relaunch the few survivors gain our support for their caring efforts, but the weird behaviour that takes place concerning the remaining dead whales rivals the whales’ own odd behaviour in getting beached in the first place.
Suddenly an empty beach now has tonnes of dead whale meat to be dealt with. What to do?
Rational people would see that here is an unexpected food resource coupled with bones available for carving, tool making and so on. This is exactly what indigenous people would have thought in the days before government departments were available with diggers and tractors.
Indeed rational people of today, if there are any left who are allowed to have an input into the dead whale opportunity, would see that here is a whole pile of fresh meat to be cut, chilled and exported to Japan to earn foreign currency and reduce the pressure on supposed scientific slaughtering of whales to meet the Japanese delicacy market.
The whale carcass also offers local employment opportunities with carving, scrimshaw and other high value tourism industry products. In particular such actions immediately reduce the environmental pressure on the beach itself.
Well, none of this occurs! Instead, in a triumph of politically correct ritual over sensible resource use the dead whales are lined up and hastily and thoughtlessly buried by those high priests of PC, the Department of Conservation aided and abetted by a handy hired tohunga.
This group then leave congratulating themselves on their wise ways completely oblivious as to what happens next. This part is really interesting and I have witnessed at first hand the devastation that follows as the whales rot, the beach becomes polluted and often much worse environmental damage ensues, all while the burying party remain blissfully unaware of what is going on in their absence.
A pod of about 60 whales beached on Whatuwhiwhi peninsula a few years back. Following the partly successful attempts to relaunch the whales DoC officials insisted on the obligatory burial of the more than 50 dead whales bodies left behind. No meat or bones removal was allowed and diggers arrived and under DoC instruction the a series of over 50 holes were dug, the whales were placed in them, covered with sand and all left.
The site of this mass burial is on a flat sandy area between the open sea and a large wetland. Dunes nearby provided some wind shelter to nesting areas for native birds enjoying the peace of this remote site. Any normal citizen must first obtain an earthworks permit in order to excavate more than 50 cubic metres and it certainly involves more than that to bury 50 whales, but DoC did not, nor did they bother to find out whose land they were excavating, merely assuming that it was their’s to control, when in fact it turns out to be privately owned land.
Periodically after heavy rain the large wetland on the landward side of the whale burial field would flood across the flat sandy area choosing a myriad of small runnels as its path to the sea. At the next flood after the whale burial, however the escaping water finds a convenient new path to the sea provided by 50 neatly lined up holes which were never backfilled properly and by now are only partly filled by rotting corpses.
Instead of a gentle flow across the flat sandy area this flood disgorges through the new whale burial channel, which completely changes the long established stormwater runoff pattern in this fragile area for ever. Not content with this change in its stormwater flow the new channel starts eroding across the beach at an alarming rate noted only by the local land owner and friends. Within a year several hundred metres of the coastal dune is gone and the bird nesting areas with them.
Is Doc worried or even aware, let alone sorry? Well, no is the correct answer to that. Surely the whales never meant this to happen. Could we contemplate a rational response?
While we are onto government official’s real response to the environment, is there anyone at Ministry of Fisheries who understand that kahawai have disappeared since they announced that it would move to quota and the fishermen went about mass catches to establish quota?