live video<\/a> of the mammal, rejoicing in the rare moments when it moved.<\/p>\n\u201cTimmy twitches his fin!\u201d read one of a stream of updates on the website of Bild, a German tabloid. Hope was fading.<\/p>\n
Officials said in early April that they had abandoned further rescue plans and would leave the whale to die.<\/p>\n
But media attention only intensified, and a public outcry followed. Though the whale barely moved, crowds formed on the beach each day to watch. One day in mid-April, a 67-year-old woman jumped off a boat to try to get close to Timmy but was stopped.<\/p>\n
The whale held on. In mid-April, local officials approved a sophisticated operation funded by a pair of multimillionaires to use air cushions and pontoons to move the whale.<\/p>\n
A Breakthrough<\/p>\n
When that failed, rescuers came up with a last-ditch plan: a barge in which Timmy could be towed to the ocean. Rescuers used a small channel to guide the whale into the barge.<\/p>\n
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Gunz, who founded the consumer electronics company MediaMarkt, declined to say how much he had donated to the rescue mission. He said that he had become involved because he believed every creature in danger should be saved.<\/p>\n
He said he was thrilled that Timmy had made his way onto the barge and that he thought the whale sensed that rescuers wanted to help it.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe actually swam in there all by himself,\u201d Mr. Gunz said. \u201cHe proved all those people wrong who said he wouldn\u2019t be able to swim anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kevin Robinson, the executive director of the Cetacean Research and Rescue Unit, a Scottish nonprofit agency, said that rescuers should consider whether an animal was suffering, and whether that suffering was being prolonged by attempts to help. Still, he endorsed the barge effort because \u201cI have never seen an animal survive a situation like this for so long.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJust a shame it wasn\u2019t attempted from the very beginning,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Uncertain Outlook<\/p>\n
Though rescuers said that they expected Timmy to recover in his more suitable habitat, more than 200 nautical miles from where he was stranded, experts said there was no guarantee that it would survive for long.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven short-term survival is very questionable,\u201d said Burkard Baschek, the director of the Ocean Museum Germany and the scientific coordinator of the second and third rescue efforts. The whale was extremely weak, having made very little movement over the past few weeks, and suffered from other issues in addition to the freshwater skin disease, he said.<\/p>\n
The stress of being in a barge, including the loud echo of the water splashing against the steel hull, was also probably difficult for the whale, Dr. Baschek said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know how sad it is to have an animal dying at the beach where you can watch it,\u201d he said. But the rescue, he added, was \u201cnot increasing its survival chances.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Baschek said that he was heartened by how much empathy for the whale had spread over Germany and the world. But he noted that more than 300,000 whales and dolphins die every year<\/a> after becoming entangled in fishing nets. He hoped that attention in the future would focus not on rescue operations but on making oceans safer for marine life.<\/p>\nJohn Yoon contributed reporting. Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A humpback whale that was stranded for weeks off the coast of Germany was released on Saturday in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":768007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[129264,14079,315036,110975,117,51,50,44653,52,313325],"class_list":{"0":"post-768006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-baltic-sea","9":"tag-beaches","10":"tag-bild-newspaper","11":"tag-fish-and-other-marine-life","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-headlines","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-newspapers","16":"tag-top-stories","17":"tag-whales-and-whaling"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116504632630455377","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}