What a nice visit from an old friend #happynewyear! #dolphins are lucky! Keep them alive.
During the recent annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan, a rare albino dolphin was captured while his family was killed for their meat. The dolphin is likely to spend the rest of his life in captivity inside a small tank in a marine park, a cruel fate for a wild animal. Animals should never be held in captivity to provide entertainment for people, and the cruelty and severe consequences of marine parks have been proved over and over. Please join us in calling on the mayor of Taiji to demand that this rare dolphin be released back into his natural environment.
A similar case occurred last year when another albino dolphin named Angel was caught in Taiji. She was transferred to the Taiji Whale Museum, where she is still held today. Life in captivity is especially cruel for such intelligent animals, and causes them great distress. The tragic reality of marine parks was investigated in the documentary Blackfish, and the practice of hunting dolphins in Taiji was introduced to the world in another documentary, The Cove. Both of these issues are highly relevant to the case of this one albino dolphin, who was captured as a part of the dolphin hunt and will probably face similar (or worse) conditions in captivity to those endured by the animals in parks such as SeaWorld.
Don’t let this innocent animal spend the rest of his life in a small tank for the entertainment of humans. Please let Mayor Sangen know that this is unacceptable and that this dolphin deserves to live in the ocean, not in a little tank as an attraction for humans.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Mayor Sengen,
I am writing to you about the most recent annual dolphin hunt in your city. While this hunt is always cruel, this year hunters also captured a rare albino dolphin. The dolphin’s family was killed for meat, while he is expected to spend the rest of his life in captivity. Dolphins are wild animals who severely suffer from being constrained by humans, and so this fate is very cruel for this rare dolphin. Please order the immediate release of this dolphin back to nature so that he can keep living freely in his natural habitat.
The annual dolphin hunt has attracted a lot of negative attention to Taiji and to Japan in general. Cruelty should no be what your city is known for. Films like The Cove brought these practices to the public’s attention, and the world is watching your actions. I ask that you show mercy to this rare and intelligent animal by making sure that he is released as soon as possible, and that he is not forced to spend the rest of his life in confinement.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo credit: Alexander Vasenin via Wikimedia Commons
http://animalpetitions.org/41804/release-captured-rare-albino-dolphin/?utm_source=Animal+Petitions&utm_campaign=6b8568be68-APNL15112_30_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5c8ef52732-6b8568be68-77807085
The Chilling Tale of What Stopped Dolphin Slaughters at Iki, Japan
By Hardy Jones
The first awareness of dolphin slaughters in Japan came at Iki Island, located in the Straights of Tsushima, off southwestern Japan. In 1978 a news photographer from Mainichi Television took helicopter shots of a bay whose waters ran red with the blood of hundreds of dolphins. The pictures caused widespread outrage as they were transmitted around the world. I saw those photographs and vowed to do something about it.
In 1979 and 1980, I led Howard Hall and other filmmakers to Iki to attempt to bring an end to the killing by exposing the barbarity on film. These efforts are recounted in my book, The Voice of the Dolphins. What was not included in the book was what happened in the years that followed.
In 1979 we filmed interviews with the islanders, particularly Mr. Harada Susumu, president of the young fishermen’s cooperative. But we did not witness a slaughter – only the grim aftermath of dead dolphin bodies
In 1980 Howard Hall and I filmed the unspeakable slaughter of hundreds of dolphins at Iki. I jumped the first flight off the island to get the footage to CBS News in Tokyo where it was satellited around the world. After the huge international uproar caused by broadcast of the film we had taken of the butchery of bottlenose, pseudorca and Risso’s dolphins, Nagasaki prefecture withdrew the permit for the Iki Islanders to hunt dolphins later in 1980. There is an individual who claims he negotiated the end to the Iki Island dolphin massacres in 1982 but that was long after the permit to hunt dolphins had been withdrawn so there was nothing to negotiate. The people responsible for shutting down the dolphin hunts were those who stood in the bloody waters of Iki Island and filmed the killing; and Dexter Cate who kayaked into the killing zone at night and cut nets in an attempt to allow dolphins to escape. Dexter was arrested and spent months in a Japanese jail before being declaredpersona non-grata and expelled from Japan permanently. But his trial kept the world focused on the deadly events at Iki for months.
But for two occasions, one in the middle 1980s and one in 1994, the killings at Iki ended. In those two years special permits were issued to hunt dolphins at the request of the dolphin captivity industry. Dozens of dolphins went into captivity. Hundreds died.
In 2004 I returned to Iki and learned the full story of what had happened after I released the slaughter film. I tracked down Mr. Harada, whom I’d met in 1979. He told me that in the day after I left Iki in ‘79 (to get the film footage safely to CBS News in Tokyo) more than 200 journalists had descended on the island. Iki Island became infamous worldwide – a symbol of brutality to animals and shame for Japan. This massive media turn out was part of what caused the permit to capture dolphins to be withdrawn in 1980.
During my 2004 visit I videotaped an interview with the former head of the Katsumoto Fishing Cooperative, the organization that carried out the dolphin hunts, I learned a perverse irony – where once thousands of dolphins migrated by the island, today there are none. More perversely still, the fishermen who had once attempted to eradicate dolphins now wish they had could find and catch them for the lucrative aquarium trade. But there are none. Dolphins have vanished from the waters off Iki. And why is that?
Is it because the fish stocks that constituted dolphin prey have been decimated forcing the dolphins to seek food elsewhere? Is it because warming waters around the island have changed prey distribution and thus moved the dolphins elsewhere? Is it possible the dolphins learned to avoid the waters off Iki Island? Or is it because the dolphins that once migrated past Iki were simply wiped out? Any or all of these is possible.
Another shocking revelation came from the union official Sakae Hemmi and I interviewed in 2004. Standing in a room whose shelves and tables were covered with every imaginable form of dolphin statuette, plate, cup, kite or statue, he said the true reason they stopped hunting dolphins was that it was too costly to bury them. “Burying hundreds of dolphins is not cheap.” My mind chilled at the words. So the tale of what really ended the killing at Iki mimics Rashomon. Everyone sees the story through their own lens, the focus defined by memory or loss of it, ego, and fund raising strategies. And in some cases the pursuit of the truth.
My purpose in writing this blog is to illustrate the complexity of westerners trying to bring about change in Japan. More than a year after the tsunami of protest brought about by the film The Cove, dolphin hunts are still carried out at Taiji. After countless petitions and calls for boycotts the killer boats still sortie after dolphins.
Where I am putting my efforts and those of BlueVoice is into testing dolphin meat and publishing the results in order to drive down the market for the meat and make the drives financially unviable.
The story of our work at Iki in 1979 including lessons for those fighting to end the dolphin hunts in Japan is in The Voice of the Dolphins. http://hardyjonesdolphins.com/
Dolphins and Humans Are More Similar Than You Realize
In 2013, India government classified dolphins as non-human persons with their own specific rights. Because of this declaration, keeping dolphins in captivity has been banned in India. The country was the first to do so in the world, causing many people to ask questions and learn more about dolphins. Many were confused about the title “non-human persons.” Does this mean dolphins are people? Well, no. Granting dolphins personhood just gives them the same protections that basic human rights allow us.
The Nonhuman Rights Project, an organization devoted to fighting for personhood rights for animals, explains that the goal of granting animals basic human rights is to”…change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere “things,” which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to “persons,” who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them.”
Organizations, like Nonhuman Rights Project and the Dolphin Project, are helping to bring attention to how close animals are to humans. Following India’s ruling, Malibu and San Francisco passed resolutions calling for the recognition of cetacean rights. A similar resolution has also been called for in Romania.
These bans and resolutions are in place because once you learn about these animals, you realize how much we have in common with them. Here are a few of those reasons:
1. We are Social Animals
Like us, dolphins have families, as well as social groups. You know, those people you never get tired of seeing. We may refer to it as our clique, but there is a scientific terms for these groups of dolphins. Called “pods,” dolphins travel in groups of diverse numbers. Like us, they could have as little as two individuals in their group or a pod could reach up to 1,000 individuals.
2. We Speak in Different Dialects
Depending on their pod and geographical area, orcas (which are actually not whales, they’re the largest classified dolphin) can “speak” in different dialects. You can compare this the accents we have across the world: American, British, Australian, Irish and so on. This happens the same way it happens to us: our environment and learned behavior from our superiors. There is even evidence that orcas and bottlenose dolphins can learn each other’s languages, the same way we learn other languages – but they do it all without Rosetta Stone.
3. We Give Each Other Names
Dolphins may not be calling out for “Susie” or “Bob” in the ocean, but studies have shown that they do have personalized whistles for members of their pod.
4. We Have Sex for Pleasure
There are few mammals that engage in sex while the female is not ovulating. Bonobos (pygmy chimps) are one of these, and so are dolphins and humans.
5. We Have Various Sexual Identities
In an Australian-based study, scientists followed 120 dolphins for five years to take a closer look at dolphins’ social lives. They found that there are homosexual and bisexual relationships within the groups, with these relationships mainly happening between male dolphins.
6. Our Brains Are Very Similar
For her PhD thesis, scientist Lori Marino compared the skulls of dolphins and toothed whales to apes. She found that in terms of size relative to body, dolphins have larger brains. In fact, they come in second for largest brain relative to body size, right below humans. But it’s not the size of the brain, it’s what you can do with it. And dolphins are capable of some pretty complex things relative to their brain. In studies, it has been found that dolphins are in fact better at communication than humans. With their ability to produce and receive sounds, dolphins are capable at sending and receiving information at 20 times the speed we can.
7. We Recognize Ourselves in Mirrors
There’s a difference between looking in a mirror and understanding what’s there. We’ve seen our dogs and cats study the mirror with confusion. Dolphins, on the other hand, know exactly what they’re looking at: themselves. Not only that, but they also recognize changes in their appearance, showing a complex form of self awareness.
8. We Have Very Similar Genetics
Throughout studies, geneticists have found that the human genome and the dolphin genome arebasically the same. Texas A&M Scientist Dr. David Busbee explains, ”It’s just that there are a few chromosomal rearrangements that have changed the way the genetic material is put together.”
So Green Monsters, do you think that we’re really that different from dolphins?
Image Source: Jay Ebberly/Flickr
