“The Cove” LA Times Review

“The Cove”, a much-discussed, award-winning, anti-dolphin and whale-killing movie about Taiji Japan, was a late addition to the Japanese Film Festival, which opened in Japan this week.

Reading the initial commentaries, I have a new angle on this problem of killing cetaceans, at least in the case of the small Japanese fishing port of Taiji.

“The Cove” came late to Japan’s film festival lineup. The press conference at which the screening was announced took place on September 16, the day the new administration of Yukio Hatoyama took office. The new prime minister attended Saturday’s opening ceremony for the festival, although organizers vehemently deny that a change in government had anything to do with “The Cove’s” addition to the lineup.

Using a technique called drive fishing, hunters in a line of motorized boats create a “wall of sound” between the dolphins and the open ocean by banging on metal poles lowered into the water; the poles have bell-shaped devices at one end to amplify the sound. The dolphins, who rely on sonar to navigate, are immediately disoriented and terrified and swim frantically to shore to escape the noise. There they are coralled into a small cove and trapped overnight by nets; at sunrise the next morning they are herded into an adjacent “killing cove,” where they are stabbed to death by hunters using harpoons, fish hooks, and knives. The emerald waters of the cove literally turn red with the animals’ blood. Some injured or exhausted dolphins simply drown. Fishermen drag still-living animals onto boats with hooks and harpoons or tie them to boats by the tail, forcing their airholes under water. The animals are hauled by truck, or dragged over concrete roads by their tails, to a nearby warehouse for butchering; those who are still alive are stabbed again and left to die of their injuries or bleed to death. Some drown in their own blood. via Brittanica.comWriting and reading about whale slaughter and “The Cove”, and conversing with our New Zealand friend Dave Head, I saw the cetacean-rights issue as largely economic and secondarily as cultural. I was wrong. The case is the opposite and mercury levels is a side-issue that might help the case.

Reading the early reports out of Japan about the Japanese people’s reaction to “The Cove”, I might as well have been reading about yesterday’s guilty verdict and flogging sentence for two women in Sudan, who wore pants.

What a Bloody Mess!

How can the president of Zambia say that childbirth is pornographic! My cortisol levels go on “red alert”, but for all my dismay, this is the reality in Zambia.

Looking at the photos of Japanese school children nearly bathed in the blood of dying whales and dolphins,   while also reading new research about the minds of animals and especially cetaceans, my cortisol levels again go on “orange alert”.

I’ve been a feminist much longer than an advocate for dolphins and whales, or the whole family of cetaceans.

Taijii coves via unicircuits.comReflecting on one of my very popular, short pieces that’s traveling the Internet, I ask myself, did I just write a catchy title: When the Menu Calls for Whale Meat or Monkey Brain, Count Me Out?