Taji Dolphin Hunt Still Turns Cove Red with Blood
The Taji dolphin hunt is one of the most notorious animal slaughters around the world. Every year animal activists look on in horror and helplessness while entire pods of dolphins are lured into coves in the town of Taji in Japan and slaughtered wholesale. These dolphin families are wiped out in front of each other in the name of local tradition. Other dolphins are rounded up and captured and sold for thousands of dollars to aquariums in China that aren’t compliant with world standards on captive animals. The 2009 movie “The Cove” was made to expose this terrible slaughter and the world’s helplessness to stop it. Ten years later it is still going on.
The film-makers filmed fishermen luring the dolphins into the cove and killing them by stabbing them with knives. Yet the killings somehow still persist. Fishermen and officials claim the killings are now humane. The actual reality of the killings though, are far from this. According to this description, this is how the dolphins die:
“A metal rod is repeatedly stabbed into the back of the dolphin’s neck and a wooden plug is inserted into the open wound to prevent blood loss. This means the dolphins die a slow, painful death, taking several minutes to bleed out or drown in their own blood.” [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/13/taiji-dolphin-hunt-activists-to-launch-unprecedented-legal-challenge]
Mere words cannot begin to describe the horror of this slaughter. Close family units of dolphin pods are killed in front of each other in pitifully cruel ways. Some dolphins who don’t die are released and die of their injuries in the wild. Other “perfect specimens” are sold for thousands of dollars to theme parks. It’s difficult to imagine the despair of seeing your whole family killed and then having to live out your life in captivity and isolation. The town of Taji still clings on to its 400 year “tradition” of whaling. The town is so attached to these traditions that the local whale museum has backed away from International agreements among zoos and aquariums not to display captive animals.
Despite the obvious scientific fact that dolphins are mammals, not fish, they are legally classified as fish in Japan, which means they can’t be protected by cruelty laws. The fishermen and town of Taji have a choice to step away from the killing, but as they are legally free to keep hunting dolphins, the killing goes on. Activists are attacking the cruelty by bringing a lawsuit based on the fishermen exceeding quotas and the dolphins’ status as mammals rather than fish.
When we see what humans do to animals we truly enter the realm of the arbitrary. Laws segmenting the animal kingdom into those that can be harmed and those that can’t; brutal “traditions” that humans cling to when it’s no longer a matter of survival; the right to treat animals as chattels and kill and torture them. Killing animals exposes us to the side of our nature that is violent and irrational. In the case of the ritualized Taji killings, we have to look unflinchingly at these practices, but also beyond them. Animal captivity for example, is not a harmless counterpoint to eating animals, it is part of the system that gives animals value as “things” rather than independent beings:
“People need to understand that if they’re planning a vacation down to Mexico and they want to swim with dolphins in captivity, they’re encouraging this behavior and this hunting season to continue.” [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/10/14/japans-dolphin-hunt-struggle-between-local-traditions-global-anger/]
The killings of Taji should throw a harsh light on the irrationality and cruelty of tradition for its own sake. Any value system in which animals and our fellow humans have a use value to us rather than independent sovereignty of their own, will inevitably become abusive. The killing grounds of the Taji waters are not an outlandish annual event, they are the ritualized nature of violence laid bare.
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