The beluga whale stuck in a lock on the Seine for a week had to be euthanized this Wednesday, after arriving by truck in Ouistreham (Calvados), where experts hoped to be able to treat it before releasing it at sea. But the very degraded state of the animal before the extraction operations stopped any hope of release, AFP reports.
“At the end of the transport, he had this expertise which was carried out and the veterinarians advised us to proceed with the euthanasia of the animal which was too weakened to be put back in the water”, explained Guillaume Lericolais , sub-prefect of the prefecture of Calvados during a press conference.
There was “from the start little chance”
There was “little chance from the start” that the operation “will lead to a return to nature”, explained Florence Ollivet Courtois, veterinarian colonel of SDIS 91. The animal was no longer eating, “its state of thinness was extreme” and his back fat had largely decreased, whereas this is what allows him to evolve in an aquatic environment at low temperatures.
“The prognosis was unfavourable, even very unfavourable”, explains the colonel.
Already on Tuesday, the beluga whale extraction operation had been described as “out of the ordinary” by Isabelle Brasseur, a member of the Marineland team in Antibes (Alpes-Maritimes). “It is an operation which is logistically extremely heavy, complex, it involves a risk”, also explained on BFMTV Lamya Essemlali , president of Sea Shepherd France.
“This animal had an insufficient muscular condition to breathe properly, he suffered from respiratory failure, so we considered that his condition was not compatible with relaxation”, explains Florence Ollivet Courtois.
Did the beluga whale die from transport?
This mode of transport by road presented risks, because “even if the dolphins are translocated quite regularly between the dolphinariums, there is a mortality rate which is important, and here we are on an individual who is weakened”, had warned Lamya Essemlali , conceding however that this option was “both the fastest but also the least stressful for him”.
“The preliminary examinations that we have for the moment tell us that in any case its survival in the place where it was impossible”, also explains Florence Ollivet Courtois. “We have the first elements of infection, in particular orbital, which make us think that in any case it was not possible to continue like this”.
She recalls that this cetacean usually evolving in cold waters was in an area “at 25 degrees and in non-salty water” and potentially polluted. “The place he was in could not allow him to survive.” In addition, the non-nutrition of the animal went back to “a very old state of affairs. He arrived in the Seine with a disease that we could not detect but which is very present”, adds the colonel.
An autopsy must be carried out to identify the causes of the cetacean’s death and the reasons that may have brought it to the Seine. The results could shed light on the behavior of the killer whale which also entered the Seine last month.