Dolphin Slaughter in Taiji Begins September
 

From what I understand (and I am not Japanese) is that the vast majority of people in Japan had no idea this was happening.

It sounds like you've seen the movie "The Cove" which is about this very issue. But maybe you missed the part where they interview various people in Japan. Most of them had no idea that this is happening.

If you haven't seen the movie, I recommend you go check it out. It's obviously something you would be interested in.

I'm not Japanese myself, so I can't tell what's happening, but in my opinion umm..... it's their culture. They've done it for decades or possible centuries. We have no choice but respect them. Unless they kill in the number that could make it extict, I couldn't find any reason to stop them except for animals' right, and animal rights is not dolphin specific, so we got to stop all animal cruelty around the world.

I really don't buy it's part of the culture so we should respect it view. There's been many things in many cultures over the years considered barbarous or unusually cruel that have been discontinued. Possibly this is one should also discontinue.

I doubt many Japanese are aware of what goes on down there and suspect many would be appalled if they did.
Many nationalists here appear to see it as just another issue of outsiders trying to interfere with their great nation. I doubt they could care less about any cultural aspects, they just like to huff and puff about any issue where foreigners poke their noses into what they see as the right of Japanese to do whatever they want.

Have any of the animal rights groups out there planned to try and disrupt the cull?

I was horrified when I saw "THE COVE". So much barbarism.

My japanese friend seemed to think it was "USUAL" and was more concerned about plants.


She quoted our fox hunting cruelty-- but fox hunting has been banned.

Its the way those poor dolphins were crying out and the callous way they were speared. We humans should be ashamed of our selves but many of us still eat meat etc.

also if the japanese did not continue to eat dolphin meat?


How long before the seas are completely empty?

I also wondered about the way Herons? are used to catch fish-- the way the bird is roped so it cannot swallow the fish?

It seems very skilful but how ethical?

I do worry about the way so many whales and other creatures from the sea are maltreated.

wow...its amazing how people divide the worth of life on this planet. lets eat chickens, cows, fish, dogs, lambs and so on...but just for love of god dont eat the damn dolphins and whales...they are so special.

news flash - they are not. :ywave:

Hmm isn't it the cruelty involved in the slaughter?

Very good point!

Let's compare.

Many dog lovers say to eat dog is inhuman, but hey! The question is how're dogs (or cats) are different than pigs, cows, lambs? They are animal that we domesticate too!

And the answer you will get is: "Dog is human's best friend!"

Oh my......(uhh... I could get banned if I say this) so everyone has dogs as their best friend eventhough they never raise it!? That's just nonsense.

I "hate" so much when some "only some" foreigners (especially from western countries) see the other cultures eat or do something that is looked barbarous and say "Hey stop it you will ruin the world" eventhough they do that for a hundred or thousand years. That's ridiculous.

Please don't forget: different culture = different logic = different perspective.

I saw some of this, it actually kind of upset me so much I couldn't finish watching it.

It's not the fact that it's dolphins they are eating/killing or whatever, it's the way they do it that people seem to have the issue with. It's very slow and painful for the animals in question, and much less humane than the methods used to kill cows etc.

I honestly don't know enough about it to comment, but I'm interested why this happens when most of the Japanese people don't know about it/don't want it? Is there any political reason or anything?

yes it is the way they are slaughtered.


I have seen films of dogs and cats in china SKINNED ALIVE!!

iF i COULD I would do no trade at all with CHINA until they stop that barbaric thing. The way the animals are crammed together in tiny cages and treated as inanimate objects is appalling.


You who do not think killing dolphins or whales is bad-- you are heartless.

Would you like to be herded and then speared?

I dread to think how they treat other living creatures.

also the cruelty to Bears unable to move in a cage too small for them having their bile sucked out.

It is horrific and way too cruel. Human Beings should know better.

damn hippies.
maybe before you start worrying about fish (i know they are mamals and yet - i dont care) you should worry and pay attention to real problems like what humans do to other humans because to each other we can be so much more cruel than to animals.
so show us how dedicated you are and dont buy anything!

hm yes humans too fight and there is much cruelty but animals are defenceless and I am not a damn hippie thank you.

so you think its okay to skin animals alive? would you like to be skinned alive?

fur (fure?) animals are skinned alive so the coats and purses would have a longer life span :)
ou..and animals are defenceless? go and say that steve erwin, or maybe "It has been estimated that 5 million snakebites occur worldwide each year, causing about 125,000 deaths." one of those 125 000 people - do they feel like its wrong to eat snakes and make boots out of them.

Animals held in cages are defenseless. The sting ray did not kill Steve Erwin to skin him and sell his fur. The sting ray did what wild animals do when people get too close for comfort: they defend themselves.

I can't tell if you are being serious about your argument (animals are animals, so there is no such thing as being cruel to them to get what we want from them) or are just playing devil's advocate.

that sting ray was never cought and brought to justice..maybe that was exacly what it wanted! ;)

and more like second option. its just that our simpathy for animals is very selective. you can burn ants with magnifying glass - yea. its normal. you can have snail collection and then squash them - no one minds. also you can use flamethrower to get rid of "dont have a dictionary..jumpy things from bible that plage the fields" ...as soon its something cute we all lose our minds over them and just panic - how can they do that? and when it comes to humans in cages...yea- you wont find an activist group for them as big as for pandas.
thats what bugs me.

OK. American people kill whales because it's an American tradition. Unless you deem Native Americans not American.

Whaling and the killing of dolphins aren't cultural traditions for the majority of Japanese. Nevertheless, there are some regions in Japan that have been doing them for centuries.

Anyway, I don't know how these western activists can go all the way to Japan and paint Japanese a race that is barbaric, that is less than "Human Beings", and at the same time be completely oblivious to the cruelties in their motherlands.

Most Japanese people know what's going on with whaling and the killing of dolphins. And most of them don't want whales and dolphins abused. Still, the western activists aren't very popular because they reek of superiority and hypocrisy, at least that's how they look to Japanese people.

Edit: For the record, I scuba dive and I'd rather watch them than eat them. But I think these activists are really fishy. Dolphin meat is so uncommon in Japan, Daichi city is actually earning only $3 million or so a year out of it. In comparison, Greenpeace's annual budget for example is over $150 million. They can totally and easily compensate these fishermen for not fishing or try starting up whale watching businesses or something. It seems to me the activists are more interested in media coverage and the money that entails it than whales and dolphins themselves. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Some people in the West share the same view.

The other Side of the Seal Hunt
The not so peaceful world of Greenpeace

I believe this view is more prevalent in Japan than in the West though. If you read Japanese, google グリーンピース or シーシェパード and you'll see what I mean. It isn't surprising really. They are depicting the Japanese as heartless barbarians. Of course the Japanese don't take kindly to them.

It's because of the money. It's like... a billion dollar industry or something. They sell the dolphins to people who want to train them for dolphin shows at aquariums. And then the ones that aren't sold are killed for their meat. Only, they label it as whale meat. Cause dolphin has toxic amounts of mercury. (This is just what I know from watching th cove, and I have no idea how much of it is true, or how biased it is.)

I do think that the movie is probably quite biased, but still quite educational, and worth the watch.

There is a difference between the breeding and killing of domesticated animals and hunting those in the wild. Few countries in the world still allow unrestricted killing of wild animal populations. To argue that killing a chicken or cow that has purely been bred for human use and consumption is just the same as killing whales or dolphins is just being disingenuous.
I too don't elevate whales or dolphins to some sort of mythical status and think it wrong to kill even one but the methods of killing dolphins in Taiji do appear to be somewhat cruel and unusual. I would also argue that the practice has little to do with cultural traditions and much more to do with financial greed.

That is downright incorrect to say the least. As I said, Taichi earns about $3 million per year. It is a very small town and they kill about 1600 a year. Most of the small whales are killed in other areas of Japan with other methods.

http://kokushi.job.affrc.go.jp/H20/H20_45.html

And biologically there is no difference between dolphins and whales. We, humans, call smaller whales dolphins. There is no conceivable reason for smaller whales to accumulate more mercury. If anything, I'd guess it'd be the other way around.

I don't see why it is OK to breed dolphins and then beat the hell out of them.

Good. So we are now talking about the method alone. The issue is easy. Or so it WAS.

It could have been super easy for Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd to compensate the fishermen or help them adopt a better, more humane method, if they wanted to. It's a tiny town with the population of 20,000. There are only several hundred fishermen. Only 1600 dolphins are killed per year.

For some reason, they decided not to do that, and instead created a hyper slanted Japanese whaler bashing film. I don't think these fishermen now listen to foreign activists even a bit. And I'll encounter yet more "fucking whale eating Jap" type of comments all over the web. Good job Hayde. Very good job. I wonder what the intension behind this whole thing is.

You may be a reasonable person GoNative, but unfortunately these activists aren't...

"It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.... You are what the media define you to be. [Greenpeace] became a myth, and a myth-generating machine."

This is what Paul Watson himself said, and to my eyes, he is truly living up to his word.

which part?

like I said, everything I mentioned was just what I learned from watching the movie. I never did any further research into the matter.

The part that it's a billion dollar industry. The size of the market of that specific method of dolphin fishing is about $3 million.

And the part they label dolphin meat as whale in order to deceive consumers. While whales and big fish generally contain relatively higher concentration of heavy metal, there is no such data that dolphins' mercury content is significantly higher than that of whales'.

lol they probably said million dollar industry in the movie. I'm not sure, as I saw it quite a while ago.

As for the part where they label dolphin meat as whale meat. I'm positive that's what they said in the movie. And it may not be because of the mercury levels. It may just be because whale meat is more popular than dolphin meat. Which is probably true.

So basically, you think Greenpeace should pay off the 'farmers' to stop whaling? That's gonna go down well...

Still, they could have helped find more humane methods of killing, as that seems to be the main issue. How do you know they haven't already?

there is way too much cruelty to animals-- I hate the fact that so much research is done on animals. Its humans who are to blame. those who wear fur coats--------------- what are dolphins supposed to do to defend themselves anyway?

by research you mean experiments? because research is good...actually both are good but also different.
you understand that basicly every medicine there is, is created thanks to experiments on animals? your everyday pills were tested on them and vacines you got as a child. if not for those experiments our level of medical treatment by no strech of imagination would be compatible with dark ages not to mention death rates going up by some 3 000 % or even more. so you rather see people dieing in agony on the streets than live with "shame" of having lab-rats?

potato is lovely.
Prohibit eating.

I wasn't born yesterday--------------goodbye evanny.

you sure write like you were.
when presented with arguments you just type "goodbye". why cant you anwser like a grownup? you said you hate the experiments that are done on animals and that humans are basicly monsters for doing that...so how is it? you are going to deny medicine and stand by your belive? or keep on bitching how bad it is, but when you are going to get sick, then you will use medicine even it cost some hundred mice lives? kinda hipocritial, dont ya' think?

siokan - video FTW :D

Cormorants, not herons. In Japan, from what i've read, you need special permission to fish using a cormorant, and the few who do (it's not exactly a thriving industry) rear their own birds and do it to maintain tradition. The bird has a flexible elastic band put on it's neck for the duration of the fishing, completely harmless and no worse than the rings we put on birds legs for tracking, which stop it from eating ~big~ fish. It can still eat small ones, and the birds aren't starved regardless. They get fed after the fishing is done. China I cannot vouch for, but really, if you're making a living off of selling tourist photos of the bird, you can't present one that is scabby and skinny.

Actually, I think there is, and quite logically. Dolphins and those categorized as "small whales" tend to be toothed; this means they eat fish rather than krill and shrimp etc. Fish retain much more mercury than krill, (in fact, shrimp have among the lowest levels of mercury absorption of all sea creatures), which is then in turn absorbed by the secondary and tertiary predators. Unlike large toothed whales, dolphins and small whales don't hunt at great depth, so they encounter more contamination in their prey. Dolphins particularly will hunt in shallows, greatly increasing the risk of contact with mercury from waste. Besides which, the main diet of large toothed whales tends to be squid, which generally have less mercury than fish anyway.

Basically it builds up so that a young dolphin could easily have a higher concentration of mercury than a young whale, although a very old whale will probably have more than an old dolphin, simply by having lived for much. much longer.

Help Me Out From Ladies Please
 

What should i do? MY GIRL won't forgive me


my girlfriend took naked pictures of herself with my fone but i didn't know
not until my course mate saw them on my fone and he made a pic slideshow

his-girlfriend.tk

and now it's all over school. She's thinking i did it myself, pls help me
this is the girl i intend to marry after my final exams 2months from now
and she doesn't even want to talk to me. What should i do?

Thanks
flowman

Help Me Out
 

What should i do? MY GIRL won't forgive me


my girlfriend took naked pictures of herself with my fone but i didn't know
not until my course mate saw them on my fone and he made a pic slideshow

his-girlfriend.tk

and now it's all over school. She's thinking i did it myself, pls help me
this is the girl i intend to marry after my final exams 2months from now
and she doesn't even want to talk to me. What should i do?

Thanks
flowman

Cormorants, not herons. In Japan, from what i've read, you need special permission to fish using a cormorant, and the few who do (it's not exactly a thriving industry) rear their own birds and do it to maintain tradition. The bird has a flexible elastic band put on it's neck for the duration of the fishing, completely harmless and no worse than the rings we put on birds legs for tracking, which stop it from eating ~big~ fish. It can still eat small ones, and the birds aren't starved regardless. They get fed after the fishing is done. China I cannot vouch for, but really, if you're making a living off of selling tourist photos of the bird, you can't present one that is scabby and skinny.

thanks very much for that. columbine-- When I have seen films of cormorant fishing it is obviously extremely skilful-- I believe that tourists like to watch this at night.

I would give you the reply you deserve-- so carry on-- being totally unpleasant.

If you see there are problems in "how they kill dolphin", I absolutely agree with you. You can kill any animals you wanna consume as long as the number is reasonable (not kill so much that they gonna extinct.). But to consume them, if you could, you should do it in more humane way.

My opinion is to eat or use dolphins' organ, it's OK (but make sure they're left enough to reproduce and survive)

But please do it in a more humane way (not some cruel method like skinning they alive, boiling them alive or throw them to the fire alive. Oh, even prisoner execution is more humane than this)

Let's say there was a small town where 200 people lived off by hunting pandas. They had been doing it for 400 years. And they had families to support.

If I were serious about stopping panda hunting, yes, subsidizing them while trying to shift them into some other industry, or maybe starting up a green tourism that incorporates panda watching or something is definitely an option.

If I were the top of a huge organization who's focus was to get more attention to their activities and rise more donations, no, I wouldn't think that would be a good idea. I should create a film that would illustrate panda hunting as cruel as possible and portray hunters as inhumane as possible.

"It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.... You are what the media define you to be."

It would help if all the hunters were foreign looking Asian men who did not speak English. I'd Incite them and have them yell at a little white girl while they were soaked red in pandas' life blood.

"Greenpeace needs to get their footage of a whale being shot, They do it every year. If you really look at it Greenpeace invests more money in advertising than they do in the actual campaign." This is again what Paul Watson himself said. If even he thinks this way, imagine how the Japanese people think of these activists.