Outrage over fate of Freya the walrus has exposed man’s inability to cope with marine mammals that go aground
, a displaced walrus who had the misfortune to choose Norway as the last stop on her misbegotten tour of Europe , it is ironic that the most famous depiction of a walrus in western art, an exquisite drawing by Albrecht Dürer dated 1521 and now in the British Museum, was also slaughtered on a Norwegian shore. In Dürer’s case, the animal was decapitated and its head sent to Pope Leo X in Rome, who had a penchant for such curiosities.
These images of literal disconnection and appropriation seem to evoke the current state of affairs for marine mammals. Outrage greeted the “euthanisation” of Freya in the Oslo fjord – she was shot in order to protect swimmers who had defied warnings not to approach her – follows a bad summer for animal interlopers from the sea. Freya’s death came only weeks after another walrus, named Mursu, ended up on the grass in someone’s garden in southern Finland.
Days later, three Sowerby’s beaked whales – among the deepest-diving and most enigmatic of all cetaceans – swam onto a Netherlands beach. The scene was almost medieval: as some beachgoers tried to guide the whales back out to sea, a topless female sunbather climbed onto one of the animals.
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