When people say rescuing a stranded whale is a waste of time, I have to bite my lip very hard - because I have heard that argument before, and I can think of thousands of reasons why it was wrong. Thousands of African penguins, to be precise.
During the MV Treasure oil spill in Table Bay, Cape Town, 20,000 African penguins were covered in oil and facing near-certain death, and some expert conservation voices scoffed that trying to save them was unrealistic, sentimental and doomed to fail. IFAW’s response team, which I was a part of, took a different view. We believed that with skill, organisation and determination, these animals deserved a chance. And so thousands of penguins were cleaned, treated and released - and the critics had to eat their words. A 95% survival success rate saw to that. That experience taught me something I have never forgotten: dispassionate reticence to try and make a difference is almost always a mistake. Hope is not enough on its own. But doing nothing teaches us nothing.
The rescue of Timmy, the young humpback whale stranded for weeks in shallow waters off Germany’s Baltic coast, has divided opinion sharply. After repeated strandings, declining condition and several attempts to help him, Timmy was eventually transported by barge and released into the North Sea. Since then, serious concerns have been raised about whether he survived, whether the rescue was carried out well, and whether the public story moved faster than the evidence.
Those concerns matter. Large whale rescues are complex, high-risk and ethically difficult. A whale stranded for a long period may be dehydrated, injured, exhausted, starving, physiologically compromised and under extreme stress. Moving such an animal can cause further harm. Release is not the same as recovery. True success would mean the animal surviving, feeding, healing and returning to normal behaviour over time.
But the wrong lesson would be to conclude that rescue itself is pointless.
We are still in the nursery stage of understanding how best to respond when large whales strand alive. These events are likely to become more visible, and potentially more frequent, as marine ecosystems come under growing pressure from climate change, shifting prey, underwater noise, vessel traffic, entanglement and habitat disruption. If our answer is simply to throw up our hands and say “they will probably die anyway”, then we guarantee that knowledge does not advance.
Every difficult rescue teaches us something: about veterinary assessment, stress, decision-making, transport, equipment, release sites, tracking, aftercare and public communication. Some lessons are hard. Some may be uncomfortable. But they are still lessons - and they matter.
That was true after the Treasure spill. It is true here too. The African penguin response succeeded not because success was guaranteed, but because people refused to confuse uncertainty with futility. We built systems, mobilised expertise, learned under pressure and acted at scale. That is how rescue capacity improves.
Timmy may not prove to be such a story. We must be honest about that. Compassion cannot become spectacle, and optimism must not replace expertise.
But nor should expertise become fatalism.
This hasn’t been about “saving” Timmy, but about giving a whale a chance. And that distinction matters. The IWC Strandings Expert Panel has warned that release is only the beginning of recovery, not the proof of it. The coming days and weeks will tell us whether this extraordinary intervention becomes a genuine rescue story. But it has already shown something important: these decisions are not about sentiment versus science. They are about welfare, evidence, courage, and knowing when a chance is real enough to take.
The real question is not whether every rescue succeeds. It is whether we are prepared to build the knowledge, systems and courage needed so that every rescue has a better chance than the last. Timmy’s story should not end in blame or despair. It should push us to learn faster, plan better and keep believing that doing something - properly, humbly and with science at its heart - still matters.
Sally Hamilton - CEO