It was going to end in tears

I'm sure everybody has heard of the bottlenose whale which swam up the river Thames as far as Battersea (south-west of the city centre) on Friday before being moved aboard a barge and taken down the river where it died at 7pm yesterday. (The BBC has more pictures here; more at Londonist.)

Northern Bottlenose whales' habitat is the north Atlantic, and no whale of this species has been seen in the Thames since records began in 1913. (This doesn't mean that one was seen in 1913 – it just means that they started recording then, and have never seen one until now.) I remember the incident of a whale being beached on the Thames (further downstream) and the attempts to get it back out to sea, and it turned out to have been ill, and beached again and died. (This may have been the minke whale incident in 1996.)

I don't know about anyone else, but when I heard of the story I suspected from the beginning that it would not return to the sea alive, which made me all the more surprised when I heard of the enormous rescue effort and that an appeal had been sent out for an ocean-going vessel to take the animal back to the Atlantic! Apparently any of the shipping companies would have been willing to take part in the "rescue" for the PR. Are shipping companies really loaded enough to send a vessel down the English Channel (all the way to west Ireland, as was suggested) just to rescue a whale?