Damned Dolphins

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There is no secrecy in the fact that thousands upon thousands of harmless dolphins are killed each year in the town of Taiji, Japan. Furthermore, there is no secrecy in this act of killing. Not only are the town willingly eating this meat, Japan is aware of this town and will protect its “culture.” This town has faces of happy dolphins and whales all over town; showing the public how much they love their exotic animals. This is a dark love indeed as they have no shame in opening a dolphin museum five blocks away from the cove where the dolphin’s brothers and sisters are killed for their meat; mercury filled meat. I argue against the killing of these animals, also against the consumption of such meat which is very high in mercury.

Much of society was quite unaware of Japan’s little secret, but the documentary The Cove makes it seem like the dolphin treachery is carried out without acknowledgement; the practice is actually fairly well-known in Taiji, where you can buy cans of dolphin meat on store shelves, and where the marine mammals have been eaten for centuries. And according to Mayor Kazutaka Sangen, that’s not likely to change just because of a Western movie. Whaling (and dolphin-hunting) is a part of Japanese tradition, and no amount of foreign pressure is going to change that. In reality that’s generally not the case—Japan didn’t become an industrial whaling nation, hunting the animals for meat on a mass scale, until after World War II. Ric O’ Berry, the man behind showing the world of Japan’s horrors, once said that, “There is no other animal, on sea or land, like the dolphin. We have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to communicate with them, but they are always trying to communicate directly with us. They are the only wild animal I know who have saved human lives — not a few times, but repeatedly through history. They are superbly adapted to the ocean, and make even the best human swimmer look clumsy.” Though the dolphins hunted in Taiji aren’t endangered, killing them seems like a moral affront—and an unhealthy one at that, given how high in mercury dolphin meat tends to be. In Japan right-wing nationalists fought to prevent The Cove from being shown. They lost, but the movie became a nationalist football as much as an environmental film, and there’s little evidence right now that the Japanese government will back down from its push to weaken limits on international whaling or dolphin killing.

The argument doesn’t just stop at the barbaric acts of constant whaling day-in and day-out, but also selling this meat is hazardous to the consumers. Japanese researchers said Friday they had found high mercury levels in residents of the dolphin-hunting town of Taiji. The toxic heavy metal is concentrated in the food chain and can be absorbed by humans when they eat predator species such as dolphin, whose meat has been served in shops and, in the past, school lunches in Japan. Out of 1,000 people we surveyed, there were some people whose hair had high levels of methylmercury. Then we examined some 200 people including these people. But we found no neurological cases of methyl mercury toxicity. Methyl mercury was behind Japan's worst industrial pollution disaster, in which a factory dumped the toxin into the bay of Minamata in southwestern Japan from the 1950s, poisoning the marine habitat and the local population. Victims suffered spasms, seizures and loss of sensation and motor control that impaired their ability to walk and speak. Babies were born with nervous system damage and other mental and physical deformities.