Dolphin slaughter

[kitchen_kink]

I caught a little bit of Fresh Air yesterday, just the last ten minutes of an interview with the filmmakers responsible for the new documentary The Cove.

It's a movie about a little village in Japan called Taiji, where fishermen round up thousands of dolphins into a cove each year, sell the finest specimens to the highest bidders, and slaughter the rest.

I had no idea this was going on. Most of the Japanese have no idea this is going on.

But it is going on. And I think that per a discussion I was having recently about activism, I have found the thing that I cannot let go. I have to do something about this.

Ric O'Barry, who trained the dolphins who played the original Flipper and thus touched off a multi-million-dollar industry, went through a transformation when one of those dolphins committed suicide and died in his arms. Dolphins, you see, aren't automatic breathers like humans; every breath they take is a conscious act. When they're stranded, when they're under stress, and sometimes, when they are in captivity, they will simply choose not to breathe.

I am more than ever convinced that these creatures should not be kept in captivity at all, and they certainly shouldn't be killed for meat - meat that contains many times the legal level of mercury, and that is being fed to schoolchildren.

The other reason they're being killed? These fishermen consider them "pests" - competitors for fish.

Please, help stop this. This film might finally bring this to an end. But help is still needed.

Start here.

rednikki: do you know anything about this? Any way you can find out what relationship Monterey Bay Aquarium has with other organizations that keep captive dolphins?

Comments

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

You would probably like "Whale Wars"