Taiji dolphin hunt: activists to launch unprecedented legal challenge
Justin McCurry - February 13, 2019
Animal rights activists have launched an unprecedented legal challenge to the slaughter of dolphins in Japan, claiming that fishermen are routinely violating animal welfare laws and exceeding government-set quotas.
The London-based organisation Action for Dolphins and the Japanese NGO Life Investigation Agency on Wednesday submitted evidence they hope will halt the annual dolphin hunts in Taiji, a whaling town on Japan’s Pacific coast, the Guardian can reveal.
“Dolphins are mistakenly viewed as ‘fish’ in Japan, and therefore domestic laws protecting mammals from cruelty have not been applied to them,” claimed Sarah Lucas, chief executive of Action for Dolphins.
The lawsuit, filed with the Wakayama district court, “asserts that dolphins are biologically mammals, and the cruelty inflicted on them in Taiji is “illegal under Japan’s own laws”.
The allegations made against Yoshinobu Nisaka, the governor of Wakayama prefecture, where Taiji is located, include that he has allegedly abused his power by issuing permits to fishermen who violate Japan’s animal welfare laws and catch quotas. It is unknown whether those allegations will be denied.
A prefectural government official declined to comment when contacted by the Guardian, saying it was unaware of the lawsuit.
The Taiji drive hunts gained notoriety after the release of the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, whose graphic footage of dolphins being slaughtered with knives, turning the surrounding sea a crimson red, shocked audiences around the world.
If the challenge succeeds, those permits will be declared invalid, and the dolphin hunts in Taiji will not be allowed to continue, Action for Dolphins said.
“This isn’t about casting moral aspersions on Japan, but about compliance with the country’s own laws” said spokeswoman Angie Plummer. “We are trying to depoliticise the debate.”
Lucas said claims by Taiji officials that dolphins were killed humanely using new slaughter methods were false.
“The method used to kill dolphins during the hunt is exceptionally cruel,” said Lucas, who was awarded 110,000 yen by a Japanese court three years ago after she was prevented from entering Taiji’s whale museum to check on the welfare of a captive baby albino bottlenose.
“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.”
The suit also claims that fishermen in Taiji routinely flout catch limits set by the government.
It presents evidence that fishermen in the town have illegally caught more than 400 dolphins and whales in excess of their quotas in the past five years.
Under the Japanese legal definition, the quotas should include not only dolphins that are killed deliberately or sold to aquariums, but also those that are caught and released – sometimes after several days – and that die from collateral causes such as drowning or injury, the group claims.
“The irresponsible overhunting of hundreds of dolphins and whales has contributed to the near elimination of some species in Japanese waters,” Lucas said.
Yoshifumi Kai, a senior official with Taiji’s fisheries cooperative, said he had yet to read the lawsuit but denied that local fishermen exceeded quotas or killed dolphins inhumanely.
“Japanese authorities do not require us to count released dolphins as part of the official quota,” Kai told the Guardian, adding that dolphins killed for food were not left die prolonged deaths. “In most cases they die straight away, although that doesn’t happen 100 percent of the time. That doesn’t just apply to dolphins, though – the same thing happens to cattle.”
Some of the dolphins captured at Taiji are killed and their meat sold in supermarkets and restaurants, but the most attractive specimens are spared and sold to aquariums for up to tens of thousands of pounds each, according to Lucas.
In 2015, Action for Dolphins took legal action against the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums that resulted in 62 Japanese aquariums facing expulsion from the body unless they agreed to stop buying dolphins captured in Taiji. The town’s whale museum, however, quit the Japanese branch of the world association in protest and continues display and sell locally caught cetaceans.
Taiji’s fishermen insist they have no intention of ending the hunts, saying they are part of the town’s whaling heritage and a vital source of income for the local economy.
The 2018/2019 quota has been released for the drive hunt in Taiji, Japan allowing 2,040 animals (decreased by 138 animals compared to the previous season (2,040 vs. 2,178). Though 2,040 animals are allowed, in general less than 1,000 animals are actually taken.
134 Pacific white-sided dolphins
450 striped dolphins
414 bottlenose dolphins
400 Pantropical spotted dolphins
251 Risso's dolphins
101 short-finned pilot whales
070 false killer whales
020 rough-toothed dolphins
200 melon-headed whales
Defying criticism, Taiji pushes forward with bold plans based on continued dolphin hunts
Jay Alabaster - Mar. 28, 2018
A few years back, the normally sleepy town of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture was filled with activists furious with its traditional dolphin hunt, which was featured in “The Cove,” a 2009 Academy Award-winning documentary.
But as the fury ebbs, the town is now betting its future on dolphins.
“It was a bit wild back then — we never knew what was going to happen,” says dolphin hunter Mitsunori Kobata. He shakes his head as he recalls when foreign activists descended on his small hometown.
There was the time a dozen people surrounded his pickup truck on the way to work, penning him in and accosting him until a policeman could make the 30-minute drive from the next town over. Or when the activists marched through town waving a giant black flag bearing a cross and bones, or when they stopped children on their way to school to show them bloody pictures of whales and dolphins.
Western protesters had been coming to Taiji, one of the nation’s last active whaling towns and home to two dozen dolphin hunters like Kobata, since at least the 1980s. But this was different. After “The Cove,” which used hidden cameras to capture bloody footage of the local hunts, their numbers surged. The town of 3,000 was inundated, and while there was little outright violence, angry confrontations with fishermen and whalers were common.
Now, the fury over “The Cove” is fading. The activists have largely stopped coming, and Taiji is spurning international criticism against its dolphin hunts with a number of bold initiatives. The town is pursuing projects like a new sister town relationship with a town in the Faroe Islands that also hunts dolphins; a five-year, nearly $15 million deal with Chinese aquariums to supply hundreds of live dolphins and training; and a bold initiative to convert a local bay into a massive dolphin pool.
Going global
“My goal is to turn Taiji into a world-class research center for dolphins and whales,” says Taiji Mayor Kazutaka Sangen, who hints that the town’s relationship with the animals may one day shift from hunting them to something different. “The local whales and dolphins are our only natural resource, and we will continue to rely on them in the future.”
After Sangen and other officials took several trips last year to Klaksvik, a small town in the Faroe Islands that has also been targeted by activist groups for its dolphin hunts, the two towns signed an agreement to “enhance a close exchange in various fields, such as business, tourism, culture and education.”
Taiji has also leveraged the region’s deep political and economic ties to China. Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai, the venerable Wakayama representative in the Diet, has famously fostered business ties between his district and Beijing. After Taiji fishermen and politicians traveled to China as part of meet-and-greet trips organized by Nikai, the town signed a ¥1.5 billion contract with a network of aquariums in the country.
The contract stipulates that Taiji, which operates one of Japan’s oldest aquariums, will provide extended training on how to care for dolphins in captivity, as well as up to 60 animals per year. A rotating team of Chinese trainers now lives in town to receive instruction at the Taiji Whale Museum, and trainers from the town also spend extended stints in China. While profits from the hunts have largely gone to the fishermen or middlemen in the past, the income from this deal will go directly into the town coffers for public use.
Declining catches
Meanwhile, Taiji continues to develop its own dolphin and whale facilities. As part of the mayor’s 30-year plan to convert his town into a cetacean research center, Taiji is gradually working to convert Moriura Bay, twice the area of Yankee Stadium in New York City, into a giant dolphin pool.
About 50 dolphins, purchased from the drive hunts, are kept in a steadily expanding network of sea cages in the middle of the bay, fed by a small army of trainers who haul fish out by boat several times each day. Having cleared all local boats and businesses from the area, Taiji will soon begin construction on a roughly 400-meter net to stretch across the mouth of the bay.
The shift by Taiji toward research and development comes as the annual dolphin catches decline. Environmental groups like the Oceanic Preservation Society, the group behind “The Cove,” have attributed this to international pressure on the hunts.
Fishermen like Kobata, however, say it is the environment. The oceans around Taiji are drastically changing, making all fishing activities more difficult. This year, the Kuroshio — the north-flowing ocean current that runs off the coast of Japan and attracts the plankton, fish and squid on which dolphins feed — is six times farther out than normal, a phenomenon that has hurt many of the fisheries in Taiji and surrounding towns.
Dolphins and whales are hunted in several communities across Japan. The latest data from the Fisheries Agency show that in 2015, Taiji’s hunts captured 891 dolphins and small whales, a third of the 2,648 total for Japan. Taiji’s fishermen are the only ones who actively practice drive fishing, allowing them to hunt the animals for both meat and capture.
In recent years, live catches have accounted for 70 percent of the revenue from the Taiji dolphin drives, which typically bring in between ¥100 million and ¥200 million before expenses. The hunts receive broad support from the domestic press, which links them to the town’s centuries-long tradition. But at the same time, demand for dolphin meat is falling nationwide.
Homegrown protests
Activists acknowledge this tradition but say it is unconnected to the modern dolphin drive hunts, in which a small fleet of modernized boats pursue pods of dolphins by banging on metal poles placed in the water, creating a wall of sound to drive them into shore to kill or capture.
Many activists remain committed to ending Taiji’s drive hunts, especially the practice of capturing animals live for sale to aquariums. In the West, prominent aquariums such as the Vancouver aquarium and the Baltimore aquarium have announced they will no longer keep dolphins and whales in captivity.
“It is getting much harder to get attention and raise funds for awareness” for activities in Taiji, says one veteran U.S. activist, who has visited over 20 times since seeing “The Cove,” and came again this year. “But the movement to free dolphins from captivity has become a worldwide movement and will come to Japan — it’s just a matter of time.”
A fledgling movement to free captive dolphins and other zoo animals has begun in domestically, and Japanese activists held several small demonstrations in Taiji this year, along with larger marches in Osaka and Tokyo.
“We are careful not be associated with the foreign activist groups,” says organizer Sayumi Yamaguchi, who engages with local police and authorities before her events. “Our movement is still small, but it is steadily growing.”
Still, these days dolphin hunter Kobata doesn’t have much trouble. He and other members of the Isana Cooperative — the name comes from an old Japanese word for whale — hunt nine species of local dolphin from September through February each year. In the season that ended in February, a steady presence of two or three foreign activists quietly filmed and broadcast the hunts online, but made no attempts to engage the fishermen.
The town and its residents now enjoy the protection of a dedicated contingent of police and coast guard members, who in turn are supported by the prefectural and central governments, including the Fisheries Agency, the National Police Agency and even the Immigration Bureau, which has blocked many foreign activists from entering the country.
Even the ruling LDP has become closely involved. Last month, dozens of young members of the party, which staunchly supports the hunts, held a two-day meeting in Taiji and swore to protect the town against foreign interference. The town provided a lavish buffet of local dishes, including fried whale bacon and dolphin stir-fry, and the group drank to a toast from Diet member Keisuke Suzuki, who declared “We must keep the foreign activists out of Taiji!”
So while international protests continue, local activists occasionally visit, and vitriol boils online on social media, calm has returned to Taiji. Residents say the recent spike in activism is just the latest in a long line of travails faced by the old whaling town.
“Taiji is strong because everyone is so closely bonded together,” says Teruto Seko, a former dolphin hunter and longtime whaler. He speaks to a reporter before bowing at the grave of his father, which is shaped like a whale and reads, “I hunted whales my whole life, and have not a single regret.”
Seko’s family is descended from Taiji’s traditional whalers of old, who hundreds of years ago pursued their prey in dozens of small rowboats, using nets to entangle whales and hand-thrown harpoons to finish them off.
Ancient shrines and stone monuments throughout the town attest to the trials the town has endured — deadly tsunami, a massive fire, a freak typhoon that wiped out most of the whaling fleet over a century ago, and local whale boats destroyed by U.S. submarines during World War II.
“Taiji has seen its share of crises,” he says. “But they always pass.”
The notorious annual dolphin hunt got underway last week in the small Japanese town of Taiji. During the six-month hunting season, terrified dolphins are violently herded into a narrow cove. Most are slaughtered — but scores of “good-looking” ones are captured and shipped off to aquariums.
TAIJI A SLAUGHTER TOWN - 6 MONTHS A YEAR. Taiji new season of 6 months. I made this yesterday thinking about all the cruelty in mind. Footage from Sea Shepherd. It's a shame that this can happen in 2015 and not get a big reaction enough to end this. Even Ambassador Kennedy kept quiet the whole season last. What is happening in our world and it's all if us that needs to change this by Join the Movement. Please contact seashepherdglobal.org for more information hoe you can help or dolphinproject.net Take Action. Join. Contact us:[email protected] http://facebook.com/cetaceanspecies Twitter ANTI THREE OFFICIAL @kimberlyrules
