What were they thinking?? 😬

One time I blew up a whale in my pajamas.

How it got in my pajamas I'll never know.

Oh wow, maybe that's where they got the inspiration for Swinging Safari (https://moviechat.org/tt5473090/Swinging-Safari) because that's exactly what happens in that film. I wouldn't recommend watching it though, it's pretty average.

Sending your kids to strangers homes on Halloween night to accept whatever they dump into the bag probably isn't that great of an idea. But when we lived in naive and trusting times, we did, and sometimes still do this.

It's comical, but I'm not too surprised some small community would figure blowing the offending whale to smithereens is a reasonable solution.
I mean, we have the 2nd Amendment, right? Might makes right?

My boyfriend told me about this exploding whale a while back. I giggled picturing the officials discussing their options and deciding, “hey, we got explosives, let’s just blow the bastard up! What’s the worst that could happen?”
😂good ol’ merica! 🇺🇸🐳🧨

Sounds like they had a whale of a time! 🤭

Why was exploding the whale it a bad idea?

The whale's flesh in small bits will decompose much quicker. Instead of having a big pile of rotting flesh for weeks and even months, it will decompose and get into the soil in a couple of weeks.

ha i remember hearing that story years ago. certainly seems like a bad idea, but the world needs chance-takers!

this doesn't really have anything to do with your post, but you've reminded me of a story i read years ago about whale corpses. there are actually many species who've evolved specifically to live off of and around decomposing whale carcasses. it's quite a neat little example of specialization in evolution, i guess.

http://nautil.us/blog/the-strange-ecosystem-in-the-sea-dead-whales

It wouldn’t be quite right to think of a “whale fall” as a dead animal on land—say, an elephant—that hyenas and buzzards flock to for easy pickings. That’s because, as Sumida and his colleagues write in their Nature report, “Specialized organisms have been evolving in these habitats for millions of years since the appearance of large ocean-going whales and other vertebrates before them.” They’re deep-sea sources of “evolutionary novelty and biodiversity,” in other words. In the case of the Antarctic Minke whale, 41 species, most of them unknown to science, were found grazing on and around its bones. “A whale fall is not just a carcass but a carcass that holds a community of specialist organisms,” says Sumida, “It’s a whole ecosystem.”

Oh yeah, the Exploding Whale was big in the early days of the internet, back in the 1990s. It could be called one of the first viral videos.

As to what they were thinking... apparently explosions are an established way for rangers to get rid of inconveniently large wildlife corpses found in the spring, such as dead elk in a national park picnic ground. I once saw a diagram of where to put the dynamite on a donkey corpse, just enough to insure that there were no bits too large for the crows to carry off. Well, they tried to do the same with the whale, because they couldn't haul it away and they didn't want to just leave it there until the seagulls and coyotes could finish it off. So they tried to adapt existing methods, but they seem to have miscalculated a bit...

This is all true, BTW.