Why We Reject Euthanasia of Stranded Alive Cetaceans
Rescue, treatment, rehabilitation, release and, in the hardest cases, comfort care are welfare.
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.
Stranded No More (SNM) rejects that framing completely. Our position is not that euthanasia should be rarer, better justified or better explained. Our position is that a stranded alive cetacean should not be killed. The Global Whale Rescue Alliance (GWRA), founded by SNM, writes this into the first of its non-negotiable principles: GWRA never euthanises a stranded or distressed cetacean, and its people never take part in a killing (GWRA Protocol, 2026, Principle I).
This is not a utopian position. It is the established practice of Asian stranding networks. In Thailand stranded cetaceans are treated until they recover or die naturally, and Taiwan's network has rehabilitated 52 live-stranded cetaceans and released 15, including pygmy sperm whales (Chansue, 2022; Chou et al., 2024). Even the Boys et al. survey recorded respondents from Sri Lanka, Germany, Cambodia, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates who reported no cetacean euthanasia cases, and in Cambodia euthanasia was not an option at all (Boys et al., 2026). Euthanasia is not a universal norm. It is a choice, and it is the wrong one.
This page sets out why.
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. The published euthanasia literature reflects this: it is dominated by papers on how to kill stranded whales with rifles, explosives and drugs (Coughran et al., 2012; Hampton et al., 2014; Harms et al., 2014), and Boys et al. themselves note that research has focused mainly on methods and technical guidance. In that literature, SNM has not found a single case of a stranded cetacean that was fully diagnosed, found to have a treatable condition, treated, and then failed treatment before euthanasia was recommended (SNM, 2026a).
We do not accept that killing an undiagnosed animal is a welfare tool. 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, which can identify bacteria, viruses and hormones without touching the animal (Apprill et al., 2017; Geoghegan et al., 2018; O'Mahony et al., 2024). It does not mention antibiotics delivered by dart, which were given to a humpback cow and calf in the Sacramento River without adverse reaction (Gulland et al., 2008). It does not mention sea pens, the Taranto dolphin refuge, or the low-cost pools and ponds that Thai and Chinese teams use for rehabilitation (Chansue, 2022; Liu et al., 2026).
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. Delay must never be held against the animal: to treat human failure as evidence of an animal's non-viability is to punish the patient because the ambulance arrived late (SNM, 2026b).
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. Many are, in substance, specimen-collection systems, 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. Denmark's 2024 marine mammal contingency plan says large whales over 4 m should be neither euthanised nor rescued, but left alone (Miljøstyrelsen, 2024). Tasmania's manual states that rehabilitation of a cetacean of any size is not an option (NRE Tasmania, 2022). The UK coalition decided in 1996 to focus on beach rescue rather than rehabilitation, and later cited the lack of facilities it had chosen not to build (Simmonds, 2001). A missing service is then presented as a verdict on the animal.
The networks' own data show what is lost. On Cape Cod between 1990 and 1999, 299 of 376 mass-stranded animals were euthanised or died without any rescue attempt. Of the 77 for which a concerted rescue was made, 90% survived transport to better release sites and 82% were not seen to restrand (Wiley et al., 2001). 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. In most frameworks, the experts who recommend euthanasia are the same experts whose institutions perform the necropsy that later determines whether the animal was ill, and whose institutions wrote the protocol that says nothing more could 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.
The survey itself records what drives these decisions. Responders reported that what could be done was constrained more by legal, logistical and organisational factors than by what would be best for animal welfare, and that euthanasia is sometimes performed quietly to minimise public backlash (Boys et al., 2026). In New Zealand, 27% of Department of Conservation respondents said public sentiment takes precedence over animal welfare in euthanasia decisions (Stockin et al., 2022). A decision driven by logistics and public relations is not a welfare decision, whatever it is called.
6. The cases that contradict the doctrine
The paper's framework cannot account for the cases below, because they show that stranded cetaceans can survive, can be treated, and can be rescued, outcomes the framework does not contemplate.
7. Proper response eliminates the need for euthanasia
If the response is fast, diagnostic and treatment-oriented, euthanasia becomes unnecessary. 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 before release tracks the outcome. Treatment can begin while the whale is still swimming, before it strands, preventing the deterioration that the paper cites as justification for killing.
GWRA builds this into its protocol: a public detection network that reports animals in trouble while they still swim, a deployment standard of 48 hours or less, a veterinarian assessing every stranded animal within 60 minutes of notification, and a treatment and refloat decision within three hours (GWRA Protocol, 2026). 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. Comfort care, not killing, in the hardest cases
Rejecting euthanasia does not mean leaving an animal to suffer. In the hardest cases, GWRA gives comfort care: pain, fear and physical stress are actively relieved until rescue or natural death. Comfort care is medicine, not waiting, and it runs alongside rescue efforts, never instead of them (GWRA Protocol, 2026). It includes:
- water depth or flotation that takes weight off the chest, padding, shade, wetting and temperature control;
- constant protection of the blowhole from water, sand and surf;
- pain relief chosen for the species and size, at doses that do not suppress breathing;
- quiet, few people, eyes shaded, low light at night;
- fluids, vitamin E and selenium, and anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial cover where a working diagnosis supports them;
- heart rate and rhythm monitored by needle-free ECG where available, so that pain and distress are measured and treated rather than guessed (Torrente, 2026);
- never leaving the animal alone, through every tide and every night.
This is what medicine has always done for patients it cannot yet cure: reduce suffering while preserving life.
9. 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. GWRA binds itself to stricter rules: no sedation without a recorded working diagnosis, reversible agents with reversal drugs drawn up before the first dose, a dedicated breathing observer with authority to stop any procedure, a second veterinarian's sign-off on every dose, and toxicology at necropsy if the animal dies (GWRA Protocol, 2026). 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.
10. What the animals themselves tell us
This is not just what SNM thinks. It is what has been observed, documented and filmed.
The newborn humpback calf in Espírito Santo, wedged in rocks and wounded, reacted when its mother moved her flipper nearby, and was swimming beside her two days later. Seven sperm whales in Tasmania were still alive and able to swim away after up to four days ashore. A Mediterranean fin whale that lost her flukes travelled at least 7,000 km by sculling with her flippers (Jahoda et al., 2025). Bottlenose dolphins that lost their flukes in fishing gear learned new ways to swim, and have been resighted for years living, feeding and travelling with their groups (Fazioli et al., 2026). Western gray whales that arrive at their feeding grounds thin, sometimes emaciated, regain their condition over the summer (Tyurneva et al., 2010).
These animals keep living, far beyond what the injuries and appearances that are routinely cited as grounds for euthanasia would predict. Through their behaviour and their refusal to stop, they show that they favour life over death. 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.
11. 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 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 conservation should minimise harm, including natural harms where people can relieve them. 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 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. Asked about euthanasia at the 2022 Society for Marine Mammalogy conference, the Thai veterinarian Dr. Nantarika Chansue explained that her team does not euthanise because ending a life is, in her words, "like playing God" (Chansue, 2022). We encourage every reader of this page to read the literature the paper chose not to cite, and to ask why it was excluded.
"Wouldn't a gentle death be kinder?"
It is a fair and humane question, and we take it seriously. Our answer begins with its first words: "if an animal's condition is truly dire, to the point where it cannot be saved." For a stranded cetacean, that is almost never something anyone actually knows. Here is why.
1We cannot know that an animal cannot be saved
Saying that an animal is suffering beyond relief, does not want to live or cannot recover is a medical judgement. It has to rest on data: blood values, blow and swab results, ultrasound, heart monitoring, body measurements compared with the norms for the species. In most strandings that work-up is never done. Decisions are made on visual impressions, sometimes within an hour of arrival.
Even with data, cetacean medicine is young. Tasmania's own incident manual acknowledges that the field is still developing and that there are few established protocols for the health needs of large whales (NRE Tasmania, 2022). A healthy large whale can hold its breath for more than 30 minutes and often keeps its eyes shut, signs that are easy to misread as dying (NRE Tasmania, 2022). Even the IWC's workshop on euthanasia concluded that each case has to be treated individually (IWC, 2014). A prognosis that confident cannot be made with the knowledge we have. Killing on the strength of a guess is not mercy.
2Old, sick whales at the end of their lives rarely strand alive
The question pictures an animal dying of old age or a long illness. SNM's case database shows that this is rarely who strands alive. Old, terminally ill whales tend to die at sea. The animals that come ashore alive are overwhelmingly young, juvenile or otherwise in the prime of life, often with years of life ahead of them. Many of them are calves, as in Espírito Santo, or juveniles, as at East Hampton and in the Rance estuary.
3Necropsies often find nothing wrong except the stranding itself
SNM's database shows that necropsies of stranded animals are often inconclusive, finding nothing wrong beyond the damage caused by the stranding. The published record says the same. On Cape Cod, 97 of 106 mass-stranded animals necropsied (92%) had no significant pathological findings (Bogomolni et al., 2010). In the UK, 318 of 654 cetaceans that stranded alive (48%) had no significant pathology that could explain the stranding (Barnett et al., 2011), and two-thirds to three-quarters of stranded pelagic dolphins appeared healthy and died because they stranded (Simmonds, 2001). The East Hampton humpback, examined more thoroughly than almost any stranded whale, had no underlying disease, and the cause of its stranding was recorded as undetermined (NOAA, 2010).
That matters. If whatever brought an animal ashore leaves no trace in its body, the cause was most likely temporary, or something it can recover from. These are not dying animals. They are animals in an emergency.
4Emaciation is not a reason to kill
Thinness is one of the most common reasons given for euthanasia, and one of the weakest. Body condition in whales rises and falls naturally with season, food supply and reproduction. Lactating humpback mothers lose about 17% of their body volume over the breeding season (van Aswegen et al.). Nursing Blainville's beaked whale mothers lose about a fifth of their body condition as their calves grow (Dunn & Claridge, 2026). Thin western gray whales recover over a summer of feeding (Tyurneva et al., 2010). The agency workshop on live large whale strandings itself says body condition must be read against time of year, prey and age class (Sharp et al., 2024).
An emaciated animal can be stabilised and given first aid: fluids, tube feeding by a trained veterinarian, vitamin E and selenium, treatment of parasites and infection, and then rehabilitation and feeding. The Rance estuary humpback was emaciated and survived. Mei-Mei was weak, wounded and full of parasites, and was released. Thinness shortens the time available. It does not close the case.
5We do not understand why cetaceans strand alive, so we cannot judge them
There is no single cause, or explanation, that fits all cetacean strandings (NRE Tasmania, 2022). Navigation errors over gently sloping beaches, predator avoidance, chasing prey, illness in one member of a tightly bonded pod, noise, storms and algal toxins can all bring animals ashore. Most of these leave the animal fundamentally healthy. Until we understand why a particular animal stranded, nobody can say that it cannot recover, and nobody has the grounds to end its life.
6Our focus is understanding and reducing suffering
Choosing not to euthanise is not choosing to stand back. GWRA's focus is on reducing suffering directly, with pain relief, flotation, shade, quiet, fluids and constant presence (Module 8), and on understanding what went wrong. Every case, whether the animal lives or dies, is documented, measured, necropsied when needed and published. Each one brings us closer to solving the puzzle of live strandings and to saving more animals.
This works. In Brazil, franciscana calves in rehabilitation once had extremely low survival; necropsy findings on pneumonia and missing antibodies changed how they are treated, and calves now survive for months, one for more than a year in care (Duarte-Benvenuto et al., 2026). The Mote Marine Laboratory learned enough from its pygmy sperm whale patients to keep one calf alive for almost 21 months in care (Manire et al., 2004). Knowledge comes from treating animals, not from killing them.
7Why the human comparison does not hold
The wish to be "put to sleep" is a human wish, made by a person who can speak for themselves. Even in the few countries where assisted dying for people is legal, it requires the patient's own repeated, informed request, a confirmed diagnosis and a prognosis. A stranded whale has none of these. It cannot consent, it usually has no diagnosis, and its prognosis is a guess. Where human medicine cannot cure, its answer is palliative care: relieving pain and fear while life continues. That is exactly what GWRA offers.
And for a whale, euthanasia is rarely anything like going to sleep. Shooting is unreliable for animals over about 7 m (NRE Tasmania, 2022). The published methods include rifles, explosives and large-volume drug injections (Coughran et al., 2012; Hampton et al., 2014; Harms et al., 2014). Euthanising one right whale took just over two hours (Moore, 2010). The image of a peaceful, painless end does not match what euthanasia of a large whale actually involves.
So our answer is: no, we do not think a stranded whale is better off killed. We think it deserves what any of us would want in an emergency: a diagnosis, treatment, relief from pain and fear, and a real chance to live.
Our position
Stranded No More holds that a stranded alive or distressed cetacean must not be killed. There is no list of conditions under which we consider it acceptable, and there is no exception.
Instead, we hold that every stranded alive cetacean is owed:
- a response fast enough to reach it while it is still strong;
- diagnosis by measurement, not by appearance;
- treatment of every condition that can be treated;
- refloating, relocation or rehabilitation, whichever gives it the best chance;
- a tag and monitoring after release, with the capacity to help again;
- comfort care and constant presence if it cannot yet be saved, until rescue or natural death;
- an independent, full necropsy if it dies, and publication of everything that was done.
This is how the Global Whale Rescue Alliance works. We will not allow killing to be normalised, and we will not allow it to be called a "proactive welfare tool." We will continue to document every case in which a stranded whale or dolphin is killed without diagnosis, without treatment, without rescue and without transparency, until the system changes or the public demands that it does.
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