Why We Reject Euthanasia of Stranded Alive Cetaceans
Killing an undiagnosed animal is not.
In September 2026, the IWC Journal of Cetacean Research and Management published a paper by 28 members of the global stranding network titled "Cetacean euthanasia: Addressing the strandings 'taboo'" (Boys et al., 2026). The paper recommends reframing euthanasia of stranded cetaceans as a "proactive welfare tool" and provides pre-approved messaging templates for managing public and media reactions to euthanasia decisions. The paper was written by the people who conduct euthanasia, surveys the views of the people who conduct euthanasia, and concludes that euthanasia should be normalised. It does not cite or engage with the compassionate conservation literature at any point.
This page sets out why Stranded No More rejects the paper's framing and why we believe the normalisation of euthanasia as a routine welfare tool for stranded alive cetaceans is dangerous, scientifically unsupported, and ethically indefensible.
1. From last resort to first response to "proactive welfare tool"
Euthanasia was once framed as the final option, deployed only after all alternatives had been exhausted and the animal's suffering was confirmed to be beyond alleviation. Boys et al. (2026) now recommend something different:
The word "proactive" means acting before something happens. A proactive welfare tool is one deployed before the animal has been diagnosed, before treatment has been attempted, before refloating has been tried, and before anyone knows whether the condition is treatable. This is exactly what happened to the juvenile humpback Dolly/Stormy at Port Kennedy, Western Australia, in August 2026: sedated without a blood draw, without a blow sample, without a biopsy of the visible growth, without any diagnostic test. The DBCA incident controller admitted on camera the following morning that the authorities were "unsure" whether the whale had been sick at all. The euthanasia was proactive in the truest sense of the word: it was performed before the question of illness was answered.
We do not accept that killing an undiagnosed animal is a welfare tool. We accept that it is convenient. Convenience is not welfare.
2. Rescue is never the objective
The Boys et al. paper discusses four possible outcomes for stranded cetaceans: refloating, euthanasia, palliative care, or no intervention allowing natural death (p. 76). Missing from this list is the outcome that should be the primary objective of any stranding response: diagnosis, medical treatment, rehabilitation, and release.
The paper does not mention blow sampling. It does not mention antibiotic darting. It does not mention floating pen rehabilitation. It does not mention the Taranto Dolphin Sanctuary, the Whale Sanctuary Project, or the decades of cetacean transport and veterinary care conducted by the captive industry. It does not cite O'Mahony et al. (2024), Gulland et al. (2008), Alexander et al. (1989), or any of the published literature on treating stranded or distressed cetaceans.
When rescue is not the goal, euthanasia becomes the default. The paper does not frame euthanasia as the outcome when rescue fails. It frames euthanasia as the outcome that replaces rescue. The welfare framing is the mechanism by which this replacement is performed: killing the animal is called welfare, and the public is told that this is the compassionate option. The actual compassionate option, keeping the animal alive through diagnosis and treatment, is not discussed because the system is not built to deliver it, and the paper is not written to propose it.
3. The deterioration trap: a self-fulfilling prophecy
The paper makes a claim that reveals more than its authors may have intended:
Read this carefully. The paper acknowledges that the animal may be initially healthy. It then argues that because the animal will deteriorate while stranded, euthanasia may be necessary. The logic is circular: the system does not respond fast enough to prevent deterioration, the animal deteriorates because of the slow response, and the deterioration is then cited as justification for euthanasia. This is the equivalent of saying a car crash victim appears uninjured, but because we will leave him in the wreckage in scorching heat for hours without treatment, he will deteriorate, so we are better off ending his life now.
The answer to deterioration is not faster killing. The answer is faster response.
4. Data collection networks, not rescue networks
The paper's recommendations focus on better euthanasia equipment, euthanasia training programmes, euthanasia communication strategies, and psychological support for responders who perform euthanasia. Not one recommendation in the paper addresses diagnostic capability for live stranded cetaceans, treatment protocols, rehabilitation infrastructure, or rescue methodology.
This is not an oversight. It reflects the structure of the stranding networks themselves. They are, in substance, specimen-collection systems. They are built to recover dead marine mammals and route them to laboratories. They produce excellent necropsies. They do not produce living whales, because they are not designed to. The Danish Beredskabsplan, which SNM analysed in the Hartwin Critical Brief, contains detailed provisions for decomposition classification and sample collection but no provision for diagnosing or treating a living large whale. The DBCA in Western Australia produced a press release and a sedative, not a diagnosis and a treatment. The Boys et al. paper proposes to make these networks better at killing. SNM proposes to make them capable of saving.
5. The circular authority
The paper was authored by 28 stranding network members from 15 countries. The online survey included 48 respondents from 22 countries. The workshop included 30 participants. All of them are people who respond to strandings and who perform or recommend euthanasia as part of their work. The paper surveys the views of the people who euthanise and concludes that euthanasia should be normalised. No compassionate conservation researchers were included. No independent animal ethicists were consulted. No external veterinary reviewers outside the stranding network contributed.
The same circularity operates at the case level. At Port Kennedy, the Perth Zoo veterinarians who recommended sedation are the same veterinarians whose sample analysis will determine whether the whale was ill. At Hartwin's stranding sites, the experts who told the press the whale would die are the same people whose institutions authored the protocol that says nothing should be done. The people who deny rescue are the people who justify the need for euthanasia, and they are now the people who have published a paper recommending that their own practice be normalised and their own decisions be shielded from public scrutiny through "pre-approved messaging."
6. The cases that contradict the doctrine
The paper's framework cannot account for the cases that SNM has documented, because these cases demonstrate that stranded cetaceans can survive, can be treated, and can be rescued, outcomes the paper's framework does not contemplate.
7. Proper response eliminates the need for euthanasia
If the response is fast, diagnostic, and treatment-oriented, euthanasia becomes unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. A blow sample collected in the first hour identifies the pathogen. Antibiotics delivered by dart in the first two hours begin treatment. Refloating attempted within three hours gives the animal a chance. A satellite tag placed after release tracks the outcome. Treatment can even begin while the whale is still in the water, before full stranding, preventing the deterioration that the paper cites as justification for killing.
The entire sequence from stranding to diagnosis to treatment can be completed in less time than the Port Kennedy team spent watching Dolly/Stormy before deciding to sedate her. Euthanasia is not needed when the system is built to save. It is needed only when the system is built to watch, wait, and collect samples from the body afterward. The Boys et al. paper does not propose to change the system. It proposes to make the public more comfortable with its outcomes.
8. Soft euthanasia and the demand for transparency
SNM has observed a troubling pattern across multiple stranding cases that it calls soft euthanasia: the administration of sedatives to a weakened voluntary breather, left overnight on a beach or sandbar, creating conditions under which death from drowning or respiratory failure becomes highly probable. The death is then attributed to the underlying condition rather than to the drug. The public is told the animal was sedated to ease its suffering and that it passed away peacefully during the night.
Without full public disclosure of the drug name, dosage, route of administration, and clinical rationale, soft euthanasia cannot be distinguished from genuine comfort care. SNM demands that every drug administered to a stranded cetacean be disclosed publicly within 48 hours, in every case, with the dosage and intended clinical effect documented. If the sedation is genuine comfort care, disclosure is easy. If it is not, disclosure is necessary. The Boys et al. paper recommends "transparency" in its communication strategy. We agree. Transparency starts with telling the public what drug was injected into the whale and in what quantity.
9. What the animals themselves tell us
This is not just what SNM thinks. It is what has been observed, documented, and filmed.
Hope fought with everything she had. She stranded and refloated herself, again and again, in the hostile Baltic Sea, for fifteen months, long past every expert's prediction of imminent death. Under the Boys et al. protocol, she should have been killed after the second stranding. She chose to keep living. Hartwin swam with excruciating pain from four spinal abscesses that were eroding his vertebral bone, and he refused to stop, covering over six thousand kilometres until the very end. Dolly/Stormy was photographed with her fluke raised in a powerful splash while stranded on the sandbar at Port Kennedy, still fighting, still full of life, hours before she was sedated.
These animals chose survival. They did not choose death. They demonstrated, through their behaviour, through their movements, through their refusal to stop, that they favour life over death. The fact that we should even need to state this, the fact that it needs to be argued against a peer-reviewed paper that proposes killing them as a "proactive welfare tool," is itself an indictment of the system these animals are trapped in. The animals are not asking to be euthanised. They are asking to be helped. The system's response is to redefine their killing as help.
10. The ethical counter-argument the paper ignores
The Boys et al. paper does not cite Johnson et al. (2019), who argued with 28 co-authors from Oxford, ZSL, Panthera, and the IUCN that compassion in conservation means caring for individuals, populations and species. It does not cite Ramp and Bekoff (2015), who established compassion as a practical ethic for conservation. It does not cite Beausoleil (2020), who argued from Massey University, the same institution as the paper's lead author, that Conservation Welfare requires evidence-based consideration of individual sentient animals. It does not cite Katz (2024), who argued that the principle should be to minimise harm, not to minimise inconvenience. It does not cite Wallach et al. (2020), who argued for the recognition of animal personhood within compassionate conservation.
An entire academic discipline dedicated to the welfare of individual wild animals is absent from a paper about killing individual wild animals. The omission is not accidental. The compassionate conservation literature is the strongest published counter-argument to the Boys et al. position, and its absence from the paper's bibliography ensures that the reader never encounters it. We encourage every reader of this page to read the literature the paper chose not to cite and to ask why it was excluded.
Our position
Stranded No More holds that euthanasia of a stranded alive cetacean is justified only when all of the following conditions have been met:
A full diagnostic workup has been completed, including blood analysis, blow sampling, and biopsy of any visible lesion. All treatable conditions have been identified and either treated or determined to be untreatable with documented clinical rationale. At least one structured refloating attempt has been made and has failed. Rehabilitation in a floating pen or equivalent facility has been considered and rejected with documented justification. An independent veterinary review, conducted by a veterinarian not involved in the stranding response, has confirmed that the animal's suffering cannot be alleviated by any available means.
Anything less than this is not welfare. It is killing without accountability. We will not allow it to be normalised. We will not allow it to be called a "proactive welfare tool." And we will continue to document every case in which a stranded whale is killed without diagnosis, without treatment, without rescue, and without transparency, until the system changes or the public demands that it does.
References cited on this page
Alexander, J.W., Solangi, M.A. and Riegel, L.S. (1989). Vertebral Osteomyelitis and Suspected Diskospondylitis in an Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin. J. Wildlife Diseases, 25(1), 118-121.
Beausoleil, N.J. (2020). I Am a Compassionate Conservation Welfare Scientist. Animals, 10(2), 257.
Boys, R.M. et al. (2026). Cetacean euthanasia: Addressing the strandings 'taboo'. J. Cetacean Res. Manage., 27(1), 71-93. Read paper ↗
Gulland, F.M.D. et al. (2008). Eastern North Pacific Gray Whale Unusual Mortality Event. NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-OPR-33.
Johnson, P.J. et al. (2019). Consequences Matter: Compassion in Conservation Means Caring for Individuals, Populations and Species. Animals, 9(12), 1115.
Katz, T. (2024). Taking natural harms seriously in compassionate conservation. Biological Conservation, 299, 110791.
NOAA Fisheries (2020). North Atlantic Right Whale Calf Injured by Vessel Strike. 16 January 2020.
NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center (2010). Necropsy report NY4236: East Hampton, New York.
NRE Tasmania (2022). Cetacean Incident Manual.
O'Mahony, D.T. et al. (2024). Non-invasive sampling of cetacean exhaled breath condensate. Molecular Ecology Resources, 24.
Olhasque, A. et al. (2025). Rescue of a Juvenile Humpback Whale in Brittany, France. Animals.
Ramp, D. and Bekoff, M. (2015). Compassion as a Practical and Evolved Ethic for Conservation. BioScience, 65(3), 323-327.
SNM (2026). Critical Brief on Hope. 167 pages. strandednomore.org
SNM (2026). Critical Brief on Hartwin. 58 pages. strandednomore.org/hartwin
SNM (2026). Critical Brief on Dolly/Stormy. 31 pages. strandednomore.org
Thalmann, S.J. et al. (2008). Sperm whale rescue operations in southeastern Australia. Marine Mammal Science.
Wallach, A.D. et al. (2020). Recognizing animal personhood in compassionate conservation. Conservation Biology, 34(5), 1097-1106.