The Cove

This is not a happy entry.  Nor will it be amusing.  You have been warned.


Do NOT click on the link below if you are squeamish or easily upset.  It's about the killing of 15 pilot whales in "The Cove" in Taiji, Japan yesterday, and it has some pictures along with the article which chronicles the event.
http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/news-100921-1.html


Here is some of the text:

At first light, a boat took the dolphin trainers from the public beach over to where the whales were being held in the killing cove.  They were not gone long before they returned and left the area in their cars.  Apparently, none of the whales were suitable for the live trade.  Perhaps they were too beat up from having been held in the shallow killing cove. The story that the live dolphin/whale trade associations and aquariums around the world tell that they are not involved in the killing was proven a lie this morning.

Shortly after the trainers left, the “fishermen” moved in.  Their callous efficiency denies their claims that there is reverence among them for the dolphin and whale.  It was soon over and the nets came down.  Then small boats exited the cove with their dead cargo carefully hidden from view under tarps.  The boats went out of sight around the corner and soon the police and others left the area. We lingered and then discovered that from a different vantage point we could see a barge just outside the cove that was wrapped in tarps.  This is where the whales had been taken.  The dead whales were pulled off the barge by a dolphin hunter boat using ropes tied around their tails.  Three times the hunter boat pulled about 5 whales off the barge and transported them around to the butcher house in Taiji Harbor.

I love dolphins. I always have.  And whales.  Maybe it's because I grew up near the ocean -- or maybe I'm just an intelligent, caring person.  And what's happening in Japan MUST stop.  


Every winter (summer in Antarctica) they set out to kill 1000 whales in spite of an international ban on whaling (they get around the law by calling it research which, pardon my French, is BULLSHIT).  And in Taiji, on the eastern coast of Japan, the Killing Cove operates during the fall, starting around Labor Day.  The movie "The Cove," which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary last year chronicles this holocaust.  I watched the movie earlier this year, and it was so very hard to watch, and I cried through most of it.  But I got through it because I wanted to bear witness to the slaughter, and I felt I owed it to my dolphin kin to see what is happening to them since I can't go to Japan and stop it. And now they are killing pilot whales -- such beautiful, gentle, sweet creatures.  


This year there are several activists in Taiji, present daily near the Cove which, until yesterday, had prevented the slaughter from occurring (just the fact they were there, and the bad press they've been getting in Taiji had so far kept them from killing any dolphins).  They were still kidnapping dolphins from their ocean home to be trained pets in aquariums around the world, but the ones who were not selected by the trainers were set free.  This did not happen for these poor pilot whales.


Most of the Japanese do not know about what goes on in Taiji. Most, when they see pictures or view footage from "The Cove" are outraged, and easily convinced that the carnage must end.  But the Japanese whaling industry is powerful and so far have not been able to be stopped (other than by the Sea Shepherds, who travel to Antarctica each year to harass the whalers and limit their "catch" of minke and humpback whales -- last year they reduced their take by half).  Though this year Australia, within whose waters they hunt whales, is taking them to international court to try and get them to stop.


I am heartbroken, just as I am when innocent human life is taken. Yes, they are animals -- but they are innocent, creative, intelligent creatures who are my brothers and sisters, and if human beings can be so cruel and callous towards them, there is something seriously wrong with us.