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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In June, Freya the Walrus showed up on the shores of Norway and became an unexpected tourist attraction. In spite of her appeal, or maybe because of it, Norwegian officials considered her a threat to people, people who ignored the warnings about getting too close to the friendly sea mammal. After all, Freya was a wild animal. Was, is the operative word because the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries chose to euthanize Freya. Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief at the New York Times. He's been covering Freya's story for the paper.
Jason Horowitz: Freya was a 1300-pound walrus, and she basically spent the last weeks of the summer around Oslo and entertaining Norwegians who loved watching her and getting close to her, and taking selfies with her in certain circumstances. She became the mascot of the Norwegian summer.
Melissa Harris-Perry: What was she doing there? Was she brought to Norway or did she find her way there?
Jason Horowitz: I think she got lost and lost for a long time. For years she had been appearing in northern countries, in Denmark, in the Netherlands, in Norway, even in Great Britain. She had just been on her own for a while. There's a theory by the Norwegian government, that she was perhaps following an invasive species of specific oysters to the Oslo coast and had found essentially a plethora of food to eat and so a no reason to leave. It's definitely unusual because you don't hear often about a lone walrus showing up on the beach or in a harbor, but that's what happened this summer and it was delightful for lots of people in Oslo.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Why is it that she came to the end, that she did?
Jason Horowitz: What happened was that because people kept getting close to her, the government in Norway, which at first seemed to welcome her, their messages took on a greater urgency as people in Oslo kept getting closer to her, and also as she kept getting closer to people in kayaks or people swimming out in the fjords. What the government officials started saying was, "Listen, if you don't stay away from this walrus, something bad is going to happen to this walrus."
They didn't put it quite like that, but I think that the words they used was something like, "We're going to have to greenlight an operation." this ominous language, but some hit was apparently going to be put on this walrus. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Freya was shot to death by officials?
Jason Horowitz: According to the people I spoke with. She showed up at this marina, which she had been to before, this rather fancy marina where even the king of Norway keeps his boat, and the folks out there had gotten used to her and they took it almost as no big deal. They set up some workers from the marina to keep an eye on her. It was actually just two teenage kids with walkie-talkies, and so that when she was on the boat, everyone could swim, they could jump off their floating saunas and into the water.
Then when she would dive off, everyone would have to get out of the water. She went up and down about 10 times that day. During that time, some of the managers of the marina called the Directorate of Fisheries, which is responsible for wildlife, and asked for some help. About four guys came and the manager of the marina described them as four nice guys. They helped keep an eye on Freya. They made sure that people stayed away from her.
They even took videos of her. Then at around, well, I guess after midnight, everyone left. The marina manager was one of the last people to leave. He said he left about one o'clock and he came back the next day. He found that the boat that Freya was on was gone and the ropes had been cut. Essentially, what he thinks and what seems to be true is that the four nice guys from the fishery directorate waited for everyone to leave and then took care of Freya.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm trying to understand why Norwegian officials chose to euthanize Freya instead of finding other options to keep her human fans safe.
Jason Horowitz: You would think, oh, you just shoot it with a tranquilizing dart like in a movie, and then you can move her, but because she's so big, any tranquilizer, any sedation would not occur immediately. There's a high chance that she would slip off the boat and into the water and the sedative would take effect when she was in the water and she would drown. Other ideas were floated about putting her in a large cage, but inevitably, they came down to the conclusion that was too dangerous, that she would probably die a worse death rather than a death that they considered at least more humane.
Melissa Harris-Perry: If someone was hurt or maybe even killed, and of course, someone, or at least something was hurt and killed, right? Freya was, It's not to make an equivalency between human life and walrus life, but it does seem in this case like, even if it wouldn't be a simple endeavor that maybe there is something to be said in a broader sense, not just this individual walrus, but in a broader sense about the presumption that when human life and animal life come in contact, that it is always exclusively human life that should be prioritized.
Jason Horowitz: I think that almost always. People are going to end up siding with people. I think that's clearly what happened here. People are angry about it though. There's this broad consensus that this is a sad thing that happened. Nobody is happy about it. There are people who think that it's understandable, people who are outraged, but everyone is sad about this.
One of the people who is especially sad is this guy I talked to who was so outraged and sad that he's raised money to build a sculpture of Freya. I bring him up because one thing that he said to me which took out was, why was the walrus punished and not the people? There's a valid point there that if people had been warned to stay away from her, and they were endangering her to a certain extent, then maybe we're talking fines. I don't know.
Maybe we're talking, I don't know what the correct punishment for this is if they're even doing anything illegal. There's a clear sense in Oslo and in Norway, if the extent of this is a murder mystery, that the true culprit might have been the people who got close to her. The people who are closest to the victim are often the prime suspect. I think that, in this case, that might be true also, that this disregard for what would happen to her in order to get a good social media shot of her might have proved fatal.
Melissa Harris-Perry: The last question is, so what has happened to her? We know that she was shot and killed, but what has happened to her remains?
Jason Horowitz: Once she's shot, she arrives at essentially the official veterinarian headquarters for the government, about 40 kilometers outside of Oslo. She arrives half frozen and I think under a tarp. The veterinarians get to work on taking samples: blood samples, organ samples. That means that, as one of these veterinarians declared to me, she no longer looks like a walrus. The exact thing you said was, "You will not recognize that this is a walrus anymore."
That's sad, right? This is animal that was beloved and now she's samples in a lab. Now, here's the very, very, very thin silver lining, because of the outrage in Norway, they managed to salvage the skeleton of Freya and they have given it, apparently, to the Museum of Natural History there for research. Freya has given her body to science.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Jason Horowitz from Rome, the bureau chief at the New York Times, thank you.
Jason Horowitz: Thanks for having me.
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