This sad story from Sydney…
I don’t know why they couldn’t have feed the whale. Or just left it alone to die…how scared the poor thing must have been in its last hours of life. 
Colette's death prompts community anger Friday, 22 August, 2008
The "harrowing" decision by wildlife authorities to euthanase an abandoned humpback whale calf in a Sydney waterway has prompted angry community reaction.
The injured mammal - affectionately called Colin and then renamed Colette when identified as a female - was put down by veterinarians today after being discovered in shallow waters north of Sydney earlier this week.
The baby whale was found motherless and starving on Sunday in The Basin, inside Sydney's Pittwater, nuzzling yachts in search of her missing mum.
She returned again on Tuesday after having been lured out to sea and authorities opted against making another attempt to shepherd the 4.5-metre calf back into open waters.
National Parks and Wildlife Service NSW (NPWS) decided to put down the starving animal after veterinary advice from Taronga Zoo and Sea World, and in consultation with two animal welfare groups.
NPWS spokesman John Dengate said killing the large mammal had been "distressing and harrowing", but was the "best possible result" under the circumstances.
"That was the best way it could have been done," he told reporters, adding Colette had been treated with dignity and respect by veterinarians.
"You put the animal out of its misery. To an untrained person, it might not look like the most fantastic thing, but you can't get a better result than that."
But witnesses say Colette's death was far from dignified.
"(She) actively started trying to get away," nearby resident Cherie Curchod said of the death.
"Then they dragged it to a closed tent and all the while they dragged it, it was flapping its tail, blowing out of its head and moving and trying to get away.
"It was so upsetting because euthanasia is meant to be an easy death and that whale did not have an easy death at all."
A spokesman for an organisation called the Divine Marine Group said he was 100 metres away from where the calf was given six lethal injections.
He compared what he called the "absolutely disgusting" sight of the whale being towed to the shore to the highly graphic scenes of Japanese whale hunting.
"It looked like a scene out of the Antarctic with a Japanese fishing boat. It was absolutely disgusting," Alexander John Littingham, a sea captain, told Fairfax Radio Network.
"She was clearly still alive, she was clearly moving, the line was thrashing.
"We're complaining about what the Japanese are doing in the Antarctic and we're allowing it to happen in Pittwater."
Representatives from the RSPCA and the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA) said they were satisfied with the way the euthanasia was carried out.
Mr Littingham was one of a group of protesters who tried to organise a NSW Supreme Court injunction to stop the killing but ran out of time.
"She's died a starving death over four days, and over that period of time no one even attempted to feed the whale," he said.
The dead calf was loaded onto a trailer and taken by road to Taronga Zoo, where an autopsy will be carried out to help determine if there was a biological reason Colette was rejected by her mother.
"They'll do a post-mortem to actually see what condition it was in and to actually see what might have been the problem," NPWS director Sally Barnes said.
(What if they find out it was healthy…will they try to revive it 
)Ms Barnes said authorities hoped to DNA test a whale carcass off the NSW south coast near Eden to see if it was the calf's mother.
http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustralia//colette39s_death_prompts_community_anger_555777 
Logged
. . they wouldn't know the truth if it arrived out of a 'blow-hole'.! 
