whale

Lots of people trooped along the seafront south of Scarborough and picked their way across the rocks for half a mile south of the Holbeck landslip to watch the sad spectacle of a female juvenile minke whale being butchered.
It's thought to have got its fluke snared in lobster-pot lines off Whitby, then drifted south until it was washed ashore yesterday. A passenger aboard the Regal Lady tourist boat filmed it.
By the time we got there, at low tide this afternoon, experts from the Sea Life Centre had conducted a post mortem and a very sweaty guy "from the knackers yard", as someone put it, was dismembering the rest of the carcass, amid the repellent stench of decay. It was destined to be incinerated.
As long as they were somewhere out of the way, like this one, dead whales used to be left for nature to dispose of but that's no longer allowed.
Minkes can be seen frequently from our part of the coast at the moment.