Some unknown terrible person shot a defenseless pilot whale last
month, leaving it to swim the Atlantic in agony for weeks before
it finally beached itself on the New Jersey shore and died.
Authorities are still looking for the shooter. The bullet wound
caused a fulminant infection in the whale’s jaw that prevented
it from eating, so it basically starved to death. This was
determined during a necropsy, an autopsy for animals. Along with
sympathy for the poor creature, this debacle aroused an
interesting question: How does one autopsy a whale? With four-
ton meat hooks, whaling knives and bone saws, actually. Michael
Moore, a veterinarian and whale biologist at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, does it all the time. Moore spends
much of his time studying North Atlantic right whales, an
endangered species whose name derives from whalers’ adage that
these were the “right whales” to hunt, because they’re easy to
spot and float when they die. They’re no longer hunted for their
oil, but they are entangled in