Craig Harms, associate professor of aquatic, wildlife and zoologic medicine, works with anything that’s wet – invertebrates, fish, sea turtles and aquatic mammals. Most recently he’s helped pioneer a method for the humane euthanasia of stranded whales.

The vast majority of beached whales are already dead when they become stranded on the beach. There is only about one live whale beached a year in North Carolina, according to Harms.

“Usually [being beached] means that they’re sick,” Harms said. “Rarely it’s an accident, just a whale in an unfamiliar territory that gets caught by a falling tide. Those are the best chances that a whale has to be rescued or rescue itself.”

According to Harms, whales are often stranded because of sickness, such as a parasite or pneumonia, or injury due to contact with a ship.

“They just don’t get out of the way fast enough, and they get chopped up by the propellers or just blunt trauma from the bow of the ship,” Harms said.

Harms said whales also get entangled in fishing gear.

“They get those wrapped up around their flippers and flukes and that can really slow them down,” Harms said. “They can’t swim as well and they can’t feed as well and they waste away and they eventually come into shore.”

According to Harms, even if marine veterinarians were able to move many of the injured whales off the beach, they would not survive in the ocean.

Harms said it’s inhumane to leave the whales to suffer. Once they are beached, they will usually have scavengers such as crabs and gulls starting to pick at them, especially their eyes. The sun also burns their skin until they blister, to the point that the injury is equivalent to a third degree burn.

It is hard for whales to breathe without the buoyancy of the water holding them up, as eventually the whales’ lung collapse, Harms said.

Therefore, according to Harms, euthanasia often is the only feasible option.

 “[People] will say that the stranding responders took the easy way out, got rid of the problem, but it’s really not the easy way out,” Harms said. “There’s nothing at all easy about doing this. It’s a tough decision to make, it’s tough to carry out, the only reason we do it is because we think it’s better than the alternative of letting them suffer, because they are usually not in a rescuable or recoverable situation.” 

However, according to Harms, euthanizing whales effectively is difficult.

“We did the best we could, but it was just not good enough,” Harms said of the first time he attempted to euthanize a beached whale.

Harms said he found it distressing not being able to care for the whale like he was used to being able to do for smaller animals.

According to Harms, a few of the other authors of the paper, Bill McLellan from UNC-Wilmington, Michael Moore from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Susan Barco from the Virginia Aquarium, had similar difficult experiences, and so they met together to consider better solutions to the problem.

Harms and his fellow researchers not only struggled with the sheer size of the whales, but also with how to euthanize them humanely without affecting scavengers in the area. When whales have been euthanized before, the drugs used for the process have harmed the environment. 

“The big challenge with these large whales is if we have a situation where we can’t properly dispose of the carcass afterwards, finding what we can use that is still going to be humane to the animal but isn’t going to cause problems to other wildlife,” Harms said. “That is where we came up with the combination we used.”

The team did this with an intracardiac injection of potassium chloride; a wnatural salt and something that a scavenger would avoid eating because of its taste. 

According to Harms, this in itself would not be humane, and so to relax the whale and make sure it doesn’t feel the injection it is given a combination sedatives and pain reliving drugs including midazolam, acepromazine and xylazine. 

“That’s key — we get those three other drugs before we do [the injection],” Harms said.

These preliminary drugs are given intramuscularly near the head of the whale for the safety of the workers, as the powerful fluke, where drugs are normally injected in marine mammals, is very dangerous to be around. These calm the whale, making the process easier for the animal and safer for the veterinarians.

Harms said that the danger of a beached whale was something that people really needed to appreciate – even if the whale is dead, it is still moving in the surf and can trap people that get to close beneath it. The moving body of the whale also causes a trough in the sand around it, making the water much deeper near the animal. 

To inject the whales, the researchers had to design their own needles, which are 33 and 55 cm long, in addition to a pump system. However, even though the needles are so long, they are standard gauge and so the whales react very minimally to them. People have previously used sharpened brake or refrigerator line for whale intra-cardiac injections, which works well, but are just not as functional as the needles Bill McLellan created.

“[The needle for the heart is] a lot thicker and it has side-ports instead of end-ports so that when you’re sticking the needle in it doesn’t core,” Harms said. 

It also has a quick release, or a place to attack a pressure chamber, which the researchers made out of a garden sprayer.

“It’s going to probably be more widely used now that the information is out there and we’ve had some success with it,” Harms said.

Harms said that every stranding is different, and veterinarians have to adapt to the circumstances in which procedures, materials available and drugs may vary.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than what we had before. There’s room for improvement, and I hope it does get improved,” Harms said.

Harms was the first of the researchers to have a chance to put their methods into practice.

 “It was just an incredible relief,” Harms said. 

He said while it was still depressing, he believes that he and his fellow researchers are doing the right thing.

“One of the components to the veterinarian oath is relief of animal suffering,” Harms said. “It’s hard to watch an animal that big and with that big a brain go through the really long process of dying on a beach.”