A whale lies off the island of Poel in the Baltic Sea. It has been there longer than anyone had planned, and around it, what was meant to be its rescue is now falling apart. Christiane Freifrau von Gregory, spokesperson for the private initiative, is stepping down. She says she is clearing the way because constructive and professional cooperation under the current conditions is no longer possible. The goal, she writes, had always been the professional and calm implementation of a concept that protects both humans and animals. The current developments and dynamics on the ground, however, no longer reflect the core values that she personally and the team stand for. Which values are those? They were discarded weeks ago. A clean break is unavoidable. This is what it sounds like when someone leaves and takes one last moment to explain how good they were.
The lead veterinarian Janine Bahr-van Gemmert was flown by helicopter to a hospital on Monday. Jenna Wallace, a small animal veterinarian flown in from Hawaii, has left, reportedly due to internal disagreements within the team. Mecklenburg Western Pomerania’s Environment Minister Till Backhaus said he had taken this in with great concern. The whale is lying still, he also says. Only the team is not.
MediaMarkt co founder Walter Gunz, who is helping finance the operation, speaks of an enormous strain on everyone involved. He himself says he has slept only three to four hours per night for eight days and is exhausted. We are all at the end, he says. Still, they do not want to give up.
Three to four hours of sleep. For eight days. That is meant to signal exhaustion, commitment, sacrifice. And maybe it is even true. But anyone reporting from Tehran these days, anyone waiting in Islamabad for information that no one officially confirms, anyone working in areas where information blackouts apply and every wrong move has consequences hears that sentence and pauses. Not out of malice. But because there is a distance between sleep deprivation in front of a stranded whale and sleep deprivation in an active war zone that no press release can bridge. Single mothers juggling two jobs to keep their small families alive, with little support and no safety net, they know these nights too. Not as an episode, not for eight days, but as a permanent condition that no one issues a statement about. And yet in this country there are retirees who have not slept more than three to four hours for years, not because they are trying to save a whale against all reason, but because poverty in old age keeps them awake at night, because they calculate where there is nothing left to calculate, because worry weighs more than fatigue. They do not hold press conferences about it. They do not complain to anyone. They simply do not sleep.
The real problem is not the exhaustion. The real problem is what this withdrawal says about the initiative itself. Anyone who sets out with the claim of saving an animal and leaves as soon as things become difficult internally never understood what responsibility means. Animals do not wait for better conditions. Whales do not hold press conferences to explain internal disagreements. And a clean break, as von Gregory calls it, in this context sounds less like conviction and more like a phrase that looks good when you search for it online. Anyone who knows whales knows what has happened here - it has nothing to do with animal welfare anymore.
The whale lies off Poel. It lies still, says Backhaus. Maybe that is the most dignified part of this entire story.
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