ACTOR Ross McCall is joining whaling campaigners in the Faroe Islands in a bid to raise awareness about the country's bloody "grind" tradition.

The 38-year-old Band of Brothers and 24 star, who is originally from Port Glasgow, is lending his support to the charity Sea Shepherd, which protests against whale hunting.

His visit coincides with the annual whale hunt known in Denmark as the "grindadrap", or "grind", where entire pods of pilot whales are herded into shallow bays and hacked to death with knives. The activity is a tradition dating back to the 1500s when whales were killed for meat and fuel.

Mr McCall, who travelled to the Faroes via Copenhagen after playing in a charity football match at Celtic Park on Sunday, said he had been attracted to the cause after watching a number of documentaries about whaling and dolphin hunting which he said had had a "profound effect" on him. He likened the "grind" tradition to bullfighting in Spain.

He said: "It's a cultural tradition and I totally understand that if anyone comes into your backyard telling you how to do things it's never going to go well. It was a survival thing many years ago, but that word 'tradition' gets thrown around a lot. I understand that their great-grandfathers did it and it's been passed down through the generations, but that's when they needed to survive off the meat. Now there's supermarkets and coffeehouses, so I don't really think that's needed."

It comes after a major incident on August 30 in which local Faroese whalers drove a pod of 33 migrating pilot whales to shore and slaughtered them. Sea Shepherd activists who attempted to intervene were arrested and yesterday were fined 1,000 krone (£174) each. The court is also seeking to deport them from Denmark.

Mr McCall, who has lived in Los Angeles for 14 years, will be in the Faroes until Thursday before returning to the US for filming commitments.

He said he hoped his trip would help to "shed light" on the activity.