Booby Traps at Taiji

By Hardy Jones

A very brave young Canadian woman has reported from Taiji that the fishermen have booby trapped the hill from which we video the dolphin slaughters.

Leslie-Ann Gervais is now home in a small town in Ontario. It is very fortunate that she escaped serious injury. Here is what she wrote in an email to me:

“... the booby traps were set up with "razor wire" as the ends that grabbed onto my leg, ankle and shoe were very sharp, still have a few marks...and that was from a very cautious step. They had strung more at a head-high level the next day as well...which could poke out an eye...or worse slice into someone's throat.

“The Dawn of the killing...(which happened while it was still dark)....i counted 16 men in a boat leaving the scene (last time 9-10 men)....maybe they had herded-in more later that day which is why there were more men this time and I may have even missed out on counting others too. And this time, they did the killings in the dark and they took such pains with booby traps and trying to block the look out . . .”

“When i went back again today i could not get through that one area...in fact i got caught up in barb wire even though i was looking for it! It latched on to my pants, ankle and shoe...with just one cautious step. Therefore, since yesterday they have entwined EVEN more barb wire. It is tied around trees and stretches and entwines itself camouflaged within the trees and among bushes and leaves. Yesterday, found one which was ankle high, but tied between two trees... NOW, just now saw one head high...which could easily slice through a neck or take out an eye. Makes it very dangerous for anyone who is filming or taking photos and not paying attention to their surroundings.”

Went to the cove this morning...wanted to be present for this family of Pilot Whales. I arrived just as the dawn was breaking and the slaughter was ending. "Personal Space" was in my shadow, flickering his lighter, moping around me - he was sulky, perhaps because i did not have a camera in his face.

This morning they had three nets, two on the outside and one dividing inside the cove. Perhaps because last time they had a problem with the last brave Samurai Pilot Whale who fought so hard. This family of Pilot Whales seemed to slip away quickly....as there were more men this time ...counted 16 men out there on three boats.... After the slaughter they checked the nets as though they were looking for one that had been killed, but disappeared....and made me think of the baby:(. Just so awful. At the end, a speed boat of 11 men came towards shore - all looking my way...even though i may have been scared inside....showed no fear...and gave them my best Native warrior look, 9 men disembarked and left the scene.”

What an extraordinary young woman, operating alone in Taiji!

Sadly it is clear hunting dolphins at Taiji has not ended. It is now clear to me that the only way to end it is to prove the high toxic levels in marine mammals, in the people who eat them and then connect high toxic levels to disease.

Dolphin Kills at Taiji Japan diminished

October 12, 2009
Hardy Jones

There is some good news regarding the level of slaughter of dolphins at Taiji. While some 80 pilot whales have been slaughtered during the first five weeks on the season this is far below the normal kill rate.

International pressure has been brought about by films such as The Cove. In addition revelations in international meetings that the Japanese government is subjecting its citizens to a major health risk by allowing the sale of toxic dolphin meat have put tremendous pressure on Japan to end the slaughter of dolphins.

Blue Voice will continue to test dolphins and dolphin eaters to show the extreme levels of contamination present in dolphin meat.

We are currently in Quebec at the biennial meeting of the Society of Marine Mammalogy where highly disturbing are being presented about the rise of new diseases among marine mammals and the danger of transmission to humans.

More on this in blog tomorrow.

My First Dolphin Massacre, Iki, Japan

My First Massacre
The Tragic Story of Dolphins at Iki

In 1978 I first heard of the terrible slaughter of dolphins at Iki Island, Japan. In Hawaii filming my first film on dolphins, I saw a picture in the local paper of hundreds of dolphins dead on a beach on an island off southern Japan.

By that time I was a bona fide dolphin lover, having just spent time swimming with and filming a pod of spinner dolphins off Lanai. The pictures from Japan shocked and horrified me. I could not imagine how people could deliberately kill dolphins.

I went to Iki in 1979 and 1980 as well as in later years, most recently 2006. Some interesting facts emerged from those visits.

Until 1971 dolphins had not been a problem at Iki. But in that year a current broke off from the main Kuroshio Current running from the Philippines past the eastern coast of Japan and changed the distribution of fish around Iki, bringing fish dolphins prey upon. At the same time the Japanese were overfishing their own waters and the Shichiriga Banks off Iki were one of the few areas where abundant quantities of fish could still be found. The dolphins may have been forced to Iki by shortage of fish elsewhere.

By the mid 1970s so many dolphins migrated through the area off Iki that fishermen began to worry they would consume too many fish. Their catch was falling and they were terrified. But overfishing was the culprit (plus pollution in the breeding areas) not dolphins. The Iki islanders brought in a fisheries expert who said there might be as many as 300-thousand dolphins passing by, each eating 20 pounds of fish a day. The fishermen did the math and concluded they were at war with the dolphins – a typical resource war. They began by shooting and harpooning them. Then they learned from fishermen at Taiji the Oi Komi technique of banging on metal poles stuck in the water to make painful sounds that would drive the dolphins into a bay where they would be slaughtered.

In 1978 the first mass murder of dolphins took place. The fishermen, surprisingly, had invited the media to record the event which resulted in the photos syndicated around the world, one of which I saw in Hawaii. Amazingly the fishermen thought that showing how many dolphins were in their fishing grounds would spur the government to action to eradicate the dolphins or to pay a bounty on them. Follow the money!

In 1979 I brought a film crew to Iki. We interviewed the fishermen, went out on their boats but never saw a dolphin. I made a film in which I tried to understand (not agree with) why these fishermen, who were astonishingly decent and hospitable people, would brutally slaughter as many as two thousand dolphins. They did it to protect their livelihood. It was a them or us mentality.

In 1980 I returned with Howard Hall, then a neophyte underwater cameraman, today one of the preeminent marine cinematographers in the world. We went first to Taiji where we turned our cameras on a group of 200 melonheaded whales that had been captured and were slated for slaughter. Fearing a worldwide scandal if the killing were filmed they let the dolphins go.

Howard and I then went on to Iki where we walked straight into a brutal massacre of up to 2,000 dolphins. We shot film. I got it to Tokyo where CBS News processed it and satellited it around the world, causing a massive backlash against Japan.

Dexter Cate, an environmentalist from Hawaii, untied some of the nets holding those dolphins not yet killed. He was arrested, tried and sent to prison but released fairly quickly. His action brought further attention to the situation at Iki.

Late in March of 1980 local and prefectural governments told the Iki Islanders they should not hunt dolphins – at least until things cooled down. There was no hunting until the mid 1980s when dolphin slavers came to Iki with money in hand and incited an oi komo roundup resulting in the taking into captivity of dozens of dolphins and the slaughter of hundreds.

During my most recent visit to Iki I learned that there are no dolphins in the waters around Iki today. There is no consensus as to why. One plausible answer is that water temperatures have changed, removing the prey that first attracted dolphins to Iki during the 1970s. Squid boats now find their catch far to the north of Iki and report there are dolphins in those waters. The fish that have left Iki waters have been replaced by more southerly species as the waters warm. The fishermen are catching tuna for the first time.

The irony is that dolphins for captivity have become so valuable that the Iki Islanders wish they would come back so they could capture and sell them.

At Futo, where dolphins had been hunted for years, the latest hunts occurring in 1999 and 2004, bottlenose dolphins have disappeared and are found on the other side of the Izu peninsula. This certainly has to do with a change in water temperatures. I can’t say the dolphins learned to avoid Futo because they were hunted for decades and always appeared offshore until very recently. But larger forces are at work in the oceans today.

Taiji - No Time to Relent Pressure

No Time to Relent at Taiji – A Thirty Year Perspective by Hardy Jones, BlueVoice.org

I’ve been going to Taiji since 1980 as well as to other ports where they kill dolphins such as Futo. My first visit to Japan was in 1979 to the island of Iki where a horrific massacre took place before our eyes and more importantly our cameras.

The huge international pressure brought about by the release of our film footage caused the Japanese fishing authorities to withdraw quotas to kill dolphins at Iki and there was no further killing there until the mid 1980s when an emergency permit was granted because dolphin captors from several countries came to the island with money in hand.

When I last visited Iki two years ago I was told there are no longer dolphins in the waters of Iki. I don’t know if they were exterminated or whether warming waters has driven the prey elsewhere. At Iki they would love to have dolphins again – to sell to aquariums.

In 1999 approximately 100 dolphins were captured at Futo, Japan. Some 14 were taken into captivity, others were killed for meat but many were released – probably due to quota restrictions.

THE COVE has caused a huge international outcry and the Japanese are very sensitive to this. Japan is not monolithic on dolphin hunting and whaling. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Tourism all oppose those bloody businesses. But the hugely powerful Japan Fisheries Agency (JFA) prevails and encourages the hunts to continue.

A major fear they have at JFA is that the bloody pictures of the dolphin slaughters will further swing international opinion against whaling which is of far greater importance to them than dolphin hunting.

When the dolphin hunting season opened this year Ric O’Barry brought a busload of reporters to Taiji. No hunting took place while the press was there but very little can be read from that. The dolphin hunters would not kill in front of such a gathering of world media.

Then a group of dolphins and pilot whales was taken. The fifty pilot whales were killed. Some thirty bottlenose dolphins were taken for captivity and the rest let go. This release may or may not indicate a change in policy.

It may help to clarify Taiji’s and the Japan Fisheries Agency’s intentions at Taiji to know that the Japanese use the following words:

Dolphin: iruka - bando iruka for bottlenose dolphins
Pilot whale: ma gondo
Risso’s dolphin: hana gondo

They define the latter two as whales. So they could say they are giving up killing dolphins and still kill pilot whales and other “gondo” in large numbers.

Also, it may be that the Taiji coop is now realizing that they should not kill bottlenose dolphins for meat as they fetch such a high price in the captivity trade. Remember the Iki islanders now wish they had dolphins back and the lesson may not have been lost on the fishermen at Taiji.

Finally, it is not unprecedented for dolphin hunters to release bottlenose dolphins after taking a number of them as captives as at Futo in 1999. Many bottlenose dolphins were released after some taken for captivity and others slaughtered for food.

There is a quota limit on each species which factors into the decision of whether to kill or release so they may release in order to be able to capture more for captivity later in the year.

The Cove has been a bombshell in the faces of dolphin hunters but they may stop killing “dolphins” and turn their blades on “gondo” or simply tone down the kills in the expectation that The Cove will run its course.

The final nail in the coffin of dolphin hunting may be the growing recognition that dolphin meat is highly toxic. The market for it is dwindling. At BlueVoice we continue to test dolphin meat for mercury and organochlorine contamination. We also test human hair for mercury and will soon test the blood of dolphin eaters for organochlorine contamination.
http://bluevoice.org/news_dolphinmeat.php

For now it would be a grave mistake to tell the world that the killing of dolphins at Taiji is over.

Why Taiji, Japan Fishermen Kill Dolphins

By Hardy Jones

Taiji, Japan, Nov 8, 2007


We all search for reasons why the fishermen at Taiji continue to hunt dolphins despite massive international protest and revulsion, and despite the fact that the name of Japan is besmirched by allowing such atrocities.

There are several reasons. One is that the dolphin fishermen make good money doing this, especially from selling the live dolphins they capture. The second is that the Japan Fisheries Agency never retreats, never surrenders any resource. This is the same agency that has said they will allow the Japanese Antarctic Whaling Fleet to hunt Humpback Whales this December. They thumb their nose at the world (actually it’s the middle finger they use).

The third is that those who carry out or give permission for these heinous slaughters simply lack empathy for dolphins. They do not project themselves into the skin and minds of the animals they grab from the sea, confine in nets and then slaughter in front of their families without the slightest care for their pain. Perhaps it is a simple lack of imagination.

Or perhaps their financial self-interest simply governs where they will allow themselves to experience empathy.

If they would suddenly realize that dolphins are sentient, loving, socially close, highly intelligent animals, who probably experience the world pretty much as they do, they would have to quit their dolphin killing business. They would lose money and they would have to admit to themselves the unspeakable pain they have caused. They would have to admit that they are mass murderers.

Taiji Dolphin Slaughter Draws World-wide Condemnation

By Hardy Jones

Taiji, Japan Nov. 6, 2007

SEE VIDEO OF SLAUGHTER OF RISSOS DOLPHINS AT BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE. Warning, it is highly graphic.

“This place is now a battlefield,” is how a police inspector assessed the current situation here in Taiji, Japan.

To my mind this is a huge exaggeration but shows the mind set of the people who live in this beautiful, remote and extremely quiet coastal village where local fishermen routinely capture and kill thousands of dolphins.

The dolphin hunters have been stunned by the appearance of wave after wave of filmmakers, environmentally concerned surfers, Hollywood celebs and journalists. On Monday, October 30 they had corralled some thirty pilot whales in the killing bay. As they began their grizzly slaughter 38 surfers paddled into the picture. Cameras rolled and then a remote controlled helicopter flew over bearing a small camera that recorded the butchery. The footage was soon appearing on TV and computer screens around the world.

The fishermen were apoplectic. What they fear and detest most is public exposure and here it is in spades.

For years BlueVoice operated in Taiji alone. Our documentaries appeared on National Geographic and PBS and caused avalanches of protest generated through the BV web site. The fishermen hate us and consistently tried to wrest our video from us. But they were powerless to stop us. Over the years others have joined the fight to save the dolphins here. They are welcome to the fight.

I received a very nice note from one of the surfers who had participated in this demonstration of support for the dolphins:

hi hardy having part of the surf crew into Taiji i appreciate even more the great work you have being doing all these years and we will be sure to put bluevoice out to people. with thanks, howie surfersforcetaceans.org

But this year a critical mass seems to have been reached. Just as the surfers were escorted out of town for crossing the dolphin hunters nets, BlueVoice arrived. The dolphin hunters have not ventured out since we appeared – seven days with no dolphin hunting.

My notion is that the fishermen are reeling. I think they have always imagined that interest in this abomination would melt away. But the reverse is happening. Each time word about the tragic and brutal killings here reaches the world more attention is attracted.

The combination of television and internet exposure of the dolphin slaughter here and mounting evidence of the toxicity of the dolphin meat ought to bring an end to this savagery. BlueVoice will soon publish the results of tests of both dolphin meat and fish caught in the Taiji area. Early results show the dolphin meat is contaminated by both mercury and organic pollutants at levels far exceeding Japanese health standards.

Exposing Toxic Levels in Dolphin Meat Key to Ending Slaughters. bluevoice.org/sections/ocean/doltoxin.shtml