Ric O’Barry has packed his suitcase, bound for Japan in an effort to stem the decision of now more theaters in Japan, not to show his Academy-award winning film “The Cove”.

Japanese nationalism is carrying the day, demanding that other members of the international community have no say in Japan’s national diet. 

The fact is that the majority of Japanese people don’t eat dolphin meat. Nevertheless, the dolphin slaughter in Tajii continues as a matter of cultural pride, patriarchal principles and the available fish supply. The retirement of Japanese bureaucrats also enters the politics of dolphin slaughter in Japan. 

Simply stated, men rule. There is no place in Japan’s culture for female principles — not that America is much more advanced in our philosophy. We make show dogs of dolphins while Japan kills them. Are we morally superior because the slaughter of dolphins is prohibited in America? You tell me.

As Anne of Carversvile prepares to engage in the dolphin debate in a major way, we must examine Japan’s insistence that it has a nationalistic “right” to slaughter these creatures through the prism of history.

Human Progress and Economic Pragmatism

One can’t even consider the history of dolphin-killing without confronting the quickly-forgotten reality that American supremacy was built on the killing of whales. 

Link to PBS’s “The American Experience”Whales were the fuel that made America great, the most important economic power in the world, a forgotten reality that I confronted recently watching the rehashing of America’s whaling pedigree. 

Writing about Ahab and “Moby Dick” as a university woman, my focus was on the questions of sin, the morality of killing majestic creatures and individual redemption, rather than the economic realities that America’s DNA is built on the backs of dead whales. 

Lucky for America and the world’s supply of whales, oil was discovered. I’m not proud to say that our economic ambitions would have rendered whales extinct, had oil not saves the species. Like the Japanese, killing whales was part of our DNA, our manifest destiny as a world superpower. 

Our sense of entitlement to bathe in the blood of whales in pursuit of our own economic advancement is no different than the men of Taiji. 

From writing about “Moby Dick” and whale hunting, I moved on in my university studies to writing about the emerging patriarchy, women’s subjugation, and fifth-century BC Greece, where killing dolphins was a capital offense, punishable by death.

Dolphins in Ancient Greece

In ancient Greece, dolphins were seen as messengers for the gods. And while there was no knowledge of the fact that dolphins have lived on Planet Earth for 38-50 million years by current estimates, the mammals were revered and awarded ‘person’ status. 

The clues to dolphins as ‘female’ are prolific in Greek and Roman art, and also in earlier Minoan artifacts. PBS ‘Frontline” reports in “A whale of a business: man & marine mammals : dolphins in ancient mythology”: