Notes From Me

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Dolphins, whales, profits

Someone I know had a belated Halloween party that turned out to be more of a Christmas masquerade. There, we met a visitor, of which this area only has by way of we four teachers, aikido people, "snack girls" from Russia and the Phillipines, and the occasional tourist. This guy was from Vancouver, and he was a wildlife preservationist who later told me and a few friends what his activist mission was. I was fairly impressed because as far as activism goes, it seems that you could spend your whole life doing risky stuff and only make a tiny difference (not that this isn't noble, just that it seems one must choose one's actions carefully; if you take it to extremes, you could get thrown in jail and have your plan fail...). Anyway,
There is a town near hear called Taiji that has a dolphin "resort" where customers can swim with dolphins, who have been captured from the wild and made into performance-slaves. The dolphins are herded by 13 boats, run by 26 men who are the only men in all this area allowed to kill dolphins. When they spot a migrating pod of dolphins coming, they drop cables with speakers attached and blast a wall of sound, driving the dolphins into the Taiji bay, and drop nets to prevent escape.
A few of the dolphins are kept for training purporses, and the rest are slaughtered pretty brutally, turning the whole bay red, and then they are sold for food (which is dangerous to eat due to high mercury levels). The dolphin trade yields about a million dollars a month.
Not long ago, a group called Sea Shepherd came to Taiji after a dolphin capture and unfastened the nets in the bay, but the dolphins just went over, looked out to sea, and went back into the bay, perhaps because they were nervous about more sound blasts. The two activists were jailed and all the dolphins killed. So, this guy we met has a different plan; I don't want to give him away but it involves a method of scaring the dolphins away from the boats, and if it works, he will pass the method on to groups who have the resources to carry it out. He is also trying to start up whale watching as a business here in order to dissuade whale slaughter. I think since the Japanese have been hunting whales as food for thousands of years, not hunting them for sport, it should be up to them to continue it or not, but the Japanese who send huge ships to northern seas to kill humpbacks and blue whales are not doing anything okay.
Different subject- my good friend Masami, when I told him I had seen a monkey, said, "You are the child of the yellow monkey exterminators," which I didn't get for a moment but then realized he meant WWII soldiers. Then he added, "They had permits, Cindy." It was his usual style of odd humor that I like, but the word exterminators hints at the mentality of much of warmongering; that the people beind killed aren't really people. I don't even like to kill ants. Sometimes a mosquito.

posted by lux at 7:52 PM
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