Death to the whale

One of Farley Mowat's greatest hits finally adapted into French!

In the late 1960s, near a tiny fishing port on the isolated coast of southwest Newfoundland, a huge whale, a fin whale, finds itself trapped in a salt pond cut off from the sea by the tides. Fishermen and employees of the local fish plant react as their distant harpoon-wielding ancestors would have done, except that they are equipped with rifles: they converge on Aldridges Pond to confront the encircled giant.

But a man, a writer and an ecologist before his time, settled on this same stretch of coast, will take up the defense of the majestic cetacean. While hundreds of steel bullets sink into the animal's blubber, he moves heaven and earth to come to its aid, at the risk of alienating a local population anchored in its atavisms and traditions. At first, the hunters' shots only tickle the animal. But confined to its saltwater prison, it is exposed to the cruelty and calculations of humans. This is the fate of this modern-day Gulliver that Farley Mowat tells in Death to the whale.

Through this thrilling account of a true story, he also relates the senseless war waged by humanity against marine mammals, under the cover of an industrial exploitation absurdly intended to convert intelligent living beings into perfume products and dog food. Commercial hunting has ceased, but in our warming seas, crisscrossed by cargo ships and tourist boats and riddled with fishing gear, whales are not out of the woods.

• Foreword by Paul Watson
• Format : 14 x 22.5 cm
• Number of pages : 264
• Release date : 10/01/2024
• Editions Glénat

• 100% of profits donated to Sea Shepherd France