BlueViews - The BlueVoice Blog

Introduction

November 7, 2006 - Racing to Taiji – scene of slaughter
By Hardy Jones

We are now racing to Taiji. Fifty pilot whales have been captured and will be killed. They may be dying as I write this but the weather is ferocious, raging winds and high seas. Perhaps the kill will be delayed until we get there.

The slaughter this year began early and has been horrific in its numbers. On occasion two groups of dolphins held at the same time – pilot whales and Risso’s Dolphins waiting for slaughter. Then the fishermen begin killing one group. The other dolphins in the same small bay hear the shrieks of the dying, taste their blood in the water; not fully able to comprehend what is going on but knowing horrible death is befalling the other captives.

Some might say, “if they are killing so many dolphins and small whales at Taiji today, what good has your 25-year effort done?” The answer came directly from the mouths of the fishermen. The head of the union, Mr. Tekeuchi, approached us screaming. He and four other fishermen gathered around Sakae (Elsa Nature Conservancy), Courtney Vail (WDCS) and myself. They were furious and their main message was, “If you take our pictures and put them out on the internet and television our dolphin killing business will be shut down.”

Oddly they expect that to influence us to leave. Not exactly, boys. Knowing this keeps us coming back. It is one of our major hopes for stopping this ghastly business and making the seas off Japan once again safe for dolphins.

Another answer is that where once there were many villages that hunted dolphins, today Taiji is the last village killing large numbers of dolphins in the Japanese main island. We monitor Futo and think this keeps them from resuming killing. Though they do the occasional capture they release the majority of the pod. With the focus on only one village we can concentrate our efforts, isolate Taiji and eventually end the killing there too.

The other thing we can do is count the number of different species killed to make sure the dolphin hunters don’t go over their permit.

The permit process in Japan is important and recently several villages were refused permits to take dolphins so if we can expose the brutality at Taiji again and again it will eventually end the dolphin hunt and all its barbarities there.

The growing demand for dolphins for captivity is fueling these drive hunts and we must continue to expose this as we most recently did the transfer of six dolphins to Dalien, China last May.

Our current trip to Japan is our most concerted effort to date to report from the scene closer to real time. For an unending number of technical reasons we could not webcast directly from the kill site. Those problems will be solved when a new satellite goes into orbit next year. But we will be podcasting information out with only hours delay to BlueVoice and YouTube, GoogleVideo, Ocean.com and Terra.

A series of our videos entitled “When Dolphins Cry” is being serialized at http://terravideos.blogspot.com . Other webcasting partners are waiting to receive our reports. The video will be on YouTube and Google Video as soon as possible.

We are in constant touch with Reuters about a major television and print expose they are putting together on the dolphin hunts and the captivity industry. With limited resources we have to allocate our time carefully. We have to get to Futo and then to Tokyo to get the story out.

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