The international animal rights group Sea Shepherd, on Wednesday, said it is hoping that pressure will build from within the Faeroe Islands to put an end to its traditional drive of sea mammals into shallow water, where they are slaughtered for their meat and blubber.

A local activist published gruesome video footage of Sunday’s slaughter of 1,428 white-sided dolphins on the central Faeroese island of Eysturoy in the North Atlantic archipelago. 

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“It was a complete disaster, completely unprecedented in fact, it could even be the largest single hunt of cetaceans in documented history anywhere in the world,” said Robert Read, campaign director for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. 

While the environmental activists have forever been against the practice, interestingly, even the locals, who earlier defended it, and spoken out in fear of drawing unwanted attention.

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“We must admit that things did not go as we would like to,” said Hans Jacob Hermansen, the former chairman of the Faeroese association behind the drives. “We are going to evaluate if anything went wrong, what went wrong and why, and what can we do to avoid that in the future.”

Sea Shepherd opened up about expecting “much tighter restrictions” around such hunts and, if not, “at least a ban on the killing of the Atlantic white-sided dolphins.”

Each year, the practice sees herds of the mammals being driven into shallow waters and getting stabbed to death. 

“The killing of pilot whales is not very much different from killing cattle or anything else. It’s just that we have an open abattoir,” Hermansen told The Associated Press. “Everyone can see it … but if a cow also doesn’t die immediately, you don’t stop killing cattle.”

The white-side dolphins and pilot whales are not endangered species. 

However, he added that the slaughter that happened on Sunday was “completely indiscriminate. The entire pod is killed and pregnant mothers, calves, everything.” He revealed that residents used “power boats and jet skis to chase dolphins and pilot whales for hours on end, they really have no chance of escape.”

With Inputs from Associated Press