Taiji is a small village in Japan, notorious for its annual Dolphin drive as featured in the 2009 Academy Award-winning movie The Cove by Louie Psihoyos. You can see the Cove on Amazon Prime here
From the start of September until the end of February every year, a large-scale hunt of dolphins takes place. During this period, fishermen, or more appropriately, dolphin hunters, utilise drive hunt techniques to herd large numbers of dolphins to shore, resulting in their capture or death.
Dolphin Drive Hunts
Twenty-six licensed fishermen carry out the capture of dolphins in Taiji. They have permits from the Japanese government to carry out Drive hunts to capture and kill a specified number of dolphins each year. Most people in the town of Taiji have nothing to do with these hunts. The Japanese people, as a whole, are not aware of these hunts.
The fishermen of Taiji have become highly effective at locating, capturing and killing dolphins, sometimes as many as one hundred or more in a single day.
Just before sunrise, motor boats leave the harbour searching for wild dolphin pods, heading to deep water where the dolphins migrate. The Dolphins have been using these migratory paths for thousands, perhaps millions, of years, and the hunters know exactly where to find them. They fan out their boats for many miles offshore, beyond the horizon.
When a Dolphin pod is located, the fishermen position their boats one behind the other, evenly spaced. They lower several stainless steel poles into the water, one on each side of each boat. The poles are flared out at the bottom, much like a bell, which amplifies the sound produced as the hunters repeatedly hit the poles with hammers. The noise creates a wall of sound underwater, and the Dolphins find themselves trapped between this wall of sound and the shoreline. To escape the sound, the dolphins swim in the opposite direction, toward the shore.
Now, in desperation and panic, the dolphins’ lose their sense of navigation, the fishermen drive them into a small cove near Taiji harbour. The whole process can take several hours, during which the dolphins grow ever-more exhausted. Nets are drawn across the mouth of the cove to close off any exit routes so the dolphins remain trapped.
The Fishermen then force the dolphins into shallow water, close to the rocky beach. Here, they are inspected by Trainers from the Dolphinarium and Marine Park industry who select individuals that have a high sales value, as much as $150,000 per animal, whilst the old, the young, or those with skin imperfections are left to be slaughtered by the fishermen.
When the documentary “The Cove” was filmed, fishermen killed the dolphins with long, sharp spears. They would stab the dolphins with their fishermen’s hooks and haul the still-living dolphins onto their boats. The dolphins thrashed about in their blood, and their screams filled the air. The slaughter turned the waters of the cove blood red.
Since “The Cove” raised awareness of this brutal treatment of sentient dolphins all around the world, the fishermen have not stopped the killing but have altered their killing methods.
They now pull the dolphins underneath an array of plastic tarpaulins to prevent anyone from filming the slaughter. Under the covers, the fishermen push a sharp metal spike into the dolphins’ neck, just behind the blowholes, that is supposed to sever the spinal cord and produce an instant “humane” death. The fishermen then push dowel-like wooden corks into the wounds to prevent the blood from spilling into the cove. It’s hard to understand that there is anything ‘humane’ about killing the dolphins in this way.
Officially, the main purpose of the dolphin hunt is to provide dolphin meat to the Japanese people – but only a small minority of people in Japan eat the meat. Dolphin meat is considered “trashy” or ” cheap, ” unlike the much more expensive whale meat.
There is another essential and rather shocking aspect to the dolphin hunt: the fishermen have said that they not only hunt dolphins for their meat and sale to the dolphinarium industry, but they hunt them “as a form of pest control.” – This will sound familiar to everyone who has opposed hunting – in any of its gruesome forms – anywhere in the world. The fishermen claim “the dolphins eat too much fish,” and the fishermen are simply killing the competition. This statement is absurd. This is a cull – driven by money and licensed by the Japanese government.
We known that over fishing of the oceans is a global issue and the Japanese fishermen, supported by their government, are driven by making money from the misery and suffering of the Dolphins. The Japanese government is making the same argument to the International Whaling Commission – that whales eat fish and therefore need to be controlled by killing. Again, they are avoiding the real issues, that we humans, with our giant factory trawlers are taking an unsustainable level of fish from the world’s oceans, and secondly, some people believe they have the right to kill animals as it is a tradition.
This desire to keep the dolphin population down is a major reason why the Japanese government is keen to issue permits for the hunts. It is not really about providing meat for the Japanese people at all, and it is certainly not about maintaining what the fishermen repeatedly refer to as their “tradition” or “culture.” The first Taiji Dolphin hunt was in 1969! It is about eradicating as many dolphins as possible to make the oceans’ fish available only for human consumption.
There are several areas in Japan where local dolphin populations have declined or have become locally extinct with the full support of the Japanese government. The powerful Japan Fisheries Agency promotes the killing of dolphins and whales as part of Japan’s “food culture”. However, very few Japanese people eat dolphin meat, and the vast majority can’t afford the extortionate cost of whale meat in the country.
The Japan Fisheries Agency perceives its role as protecting the Japanese people from the consequences of overfishing worldwide. They believe that if environmentalists shut down whaling and dolphin hunts, other Japanese fishing methods and species might be attacked.
The whaling staff of the Japan Fisheries Agency have an additional (and very personal) incentive to maintain the hunts: the sale of whale meat and government subsidies provided to protect whaling pay their salaries. Let’s be clear – This is a political issue. As is often the case, the further you research an issue, the more certainty you have that ‘politics’ will be the main issue.
The Japanese Fisheries Agency authorise fishermen to kill or capture around 16,000 cetaceans, with 2,000 of them killed in Taiji alone. The licenses are for seven species of dolphins. Not all are driven hunts, as in Taiji; some of the species are killed with hand-held harpoons from small boats.
The other licensed dolphin species are Pacific Bottlenose dolphins, Risso’s dolphins, False killer whales, Pacific white-sided dolphins, Short-finned pilot whales, Pantropical spotted dolphins and Striped dolphins.
We call on the world’s governments to unite and work together to end the mass killing of Cetaceans. These sentient, intelligent mammals should be safe to roam the oceans without fear of predation from humans, whose main motivation is to make money by exploiting and killing them.
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Further Reading
Further information on the Ric O’Barry Dolphin Project
Further information on The Cove Movie
Where to watch the Cove Movie on Amazon Prime