Nation That Has Been Following Timmy’s Journey Expresses Relief That a Whale Being Rescued Near Denmark Is a Universal Human Experience That Includes the French
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
PARIS — Timmy, the humpback whale who spent several weeks stranded on a sandbank near Lubeck, Germany before eventually being freed with the assistance of rescuers and then becoming stranded again several more times in what marine biologists called a “challenging situation” and French media called “notre baleine” — our whale — was finally released from a rescue barge and spotted offshore near Skagen, Denmark on May 2, producing a wave of European relief that crossed national boundaries in the way that only very large marine mammals in distress reliably manage.
Timmy’s Journey, Briefly
Timmy first appeared stuck on a sandbank near Lubeck on March 23 and spent the following weeks either freeing himself, getting stuck again, being helped by rescuers, or generating aerial photography that made him look simultaneously very large and very vulnerable in ways that the internet responded to with the collective emotional investment usually reserved for characters in serialized fiction. The whale is not a character. The whale is an approximately 15-ton humpback cetacean in the wrong body of water, navigating a recovery situation that required human assistance, considerable patience, and at least one barge. But the internet is the internet, and Timmy became a character, and his eventual release produced a response that was genuine and affecting and slightly disproportionate to the actual relationship between the average person and this specific whale, which is the specific magic of large charismatic megafauna in distress.
France’s Particular Investment
France, whose relationship with marine mammals has included both a tradition of whaling that ended decades ago and a contemporary commitment to marine conservation that has produced some of the world’s largest marine protected areas, followed the Timmy story with the specific emotional attentiveness of a country that takes both its cultural heritage and its environmental commitments seriously and does not always find the two in easy alignment. Timmy represented the latter — a whale, in trouble, being helped by humans who could help — without the complications of the former, which made the investment uncomplicated and the relief genuine.
French environmental ministers congratulated the rescue teams. Marine conservation organizations including those affiliated with the IUCN‘s Cetacean Specialist Group noted that humpback whale strandings in the North Sea and Baltic approaches have been increasing with changing prey distribution patterns associated with warming waters, and that Timmy’s situation, while resolved, is symptomatic of a broader relationship between humpback recovery and the altered marine ecosystem of the North Atlantic. Timmy is fine. The ecosystem is under observation. France is emotionally relieved and intellectually engaged with the larger implications. This is the French condition in its most characteristic expression: feeling something, analyzing it simultaneously, and producing a position paper about it before the emotional response has fully resolved. Timmy would not understand this. He is a whale. He is near Skagen. He is, apparently, free. C’est bien.
For more on whales, rescues, and the European public’s capacity for cross-species solidarity, visit The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
