Taiji Dolphin Butchery 10 Facts You Didn’t Know About The Taiji Dolphin Slaughter THE DOLPHIN SLAUGHTER ISN’T ACTUALLY A TRADITION. BUT EVEN IF IT WERE A TRADITION, IT COULD CHANGE. THE ENTIRE LOCAL FISHING INDUSTRY ISN’T BASED ON THE DOLPHIN SLAUGHTER. THE HIGHLY LUCRATIVE DOLPHIN CAPTIVITY INDUSTRY IS TRULY WHAT MOTIVATES THE SLAUGHTER. A SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE, NOT THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF JAPAN, IS RESPONSIBLE. THE DOLPHIN SLAUGHTER ISN’T IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE JAPANESE. THE JAPANESE ARE ALSO TAKING ACTION AGAINST THE SLAUGHTER. LESS DOLPHINS ARE BEING KILLED EACH YEAR, THANKS TO AWARENESS AND GLOBAL PRESSURE. –Note that since 2010, the number of dolphins killed each year as been under 1,000. However, the numbers of those sold into captivity range up to 247 (2012). See yearly numbers… THE WAY TO SUSTAIN CHANGE IS BY CHANGING HEARTS AND MINDS. YOU’RE NOT POWERLESS IN THIS SITUATION. Read article… Time-sensitive Petition to the White House – Although it goes without saying that President Obama is unable to abolish the cruel butchery of dolphins at Taiji, each venue accessed to raise the pressure on the Prime Minister of Japan to put an end to this outrageous cruelty is a tool that cannot be neglected. Petition to White House Although hundreds of thousands of people around the world – citizens, scientists, and politicians – have taken a vocal and firm stand against the ugly, painful Taiji dolphin drives, at this time there are only 2,723 signatures on the White House petition. Clearly the petition has not had enough publicity. We need to get the word out fast. A total of 100,000 signatures are needed by February 19, 2014 to gain an official response from the White House. March 15, 2014 update: Cannot find the results of the original petition. Will keep looking and post what is found. Rare albino baby captured, separated from mother Taji drive hunt, January 2014. Rare albino dolphin – blind and deaf, always staying close to her mother’s side. Around her are the screams of her pod, her family. Confusion and terror. The fishermen separate her from her mother. She is very young, rare, and beautiful. She is worth a lot of money. Her mother desperately searches for her, spy hopping, circling – but the baby has been taken away. Many sources document this horror. International Science Times This Rare White Baby Dolphin Was Just Captured at the Cove. Can She Survive? A Taiji-caught dolphin can fetch more than $150,000, but we won’t know Angel’s actual monetary value until the bidding process begins. She is being held in a small tank at the Taiji Whale Museum, O’Barry says, and it is conceivable the museum could keep her as part of its collection. –Note, Sept 1, 2015. Angel remains a captive of the Taiji Whale Museum. Then again, she may not live long enough to bring in crowds. “I doubt she will survive very long,” says Courtney Vail of Whale and Dolphin Conservation. “Unfortunately her life may just be a brief punctuation mark in the ongoing conflict in Taiji.” O’Barry agrees. “I’m afraid she will end up as fertilizer or pet food,” he says, referring to a common practice of sending captive dead whales and dolphins to rendering plants. “It’s a gut feeling based on 54 years of being around captures and seeing how many do not survive their experience, especially one that young who was taken away from its mother.” Extreme stress from the drives—both the capture and the witnessing of family members having their spinal cords severed—can have a deadly effect on dolphins. “It’s too stressful; their immune system starts going down, and then they stop eating,” O’Barry says. Then there’s the question of how Angel’s mother died. Was she killed by Taiji fishermen? Did she die of stress? Or did she kill herself? Like all cetaceans, bottlenoses are voluntary breathers, meaning they are capable of holding their breath until they expire. “There’s no way to prove or disprove it,” says O’Barry, who watched a video shot on Jan. 17 of Angel’s mother in the thralls of being “absolutely panic-stricken,” seemingly racked with grief after being separated from her calf. “I’ve seen dolphins in the cove many times committing suicide, and I think I saw it again with this dolphin’s mother,” he says. “I could be wrong; it’s just an educated guess.” Cetacean scientist Dr. Naomi Rose, of the Animal Welfare Institute, doubts Angel’s mother committed suicide. “She could have surfaced right away, 10 feet from where she’d been, and no one would have been able to tell,” she says. Regardless, she adds, “removing a dependent calf from the mother is wrong on so many levels. It’s unethical, it’s poor biology because the calf’s survival is very much in doubt, and it’s poor conservation.” One Green Planet The Dolphin Project Send comments to the administrator of Japan Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, Facebook https://twitter.com/AbeShinzo Prime Minister of Japan, official Facebook Interview with Dr. Andy Butterworth, BSc, BVSc, PhD(Bristol), CertWel, CBiol, MIBiol, MRCVS, Senior Lecturer in Animal Sciences, Senior Research Fellow. Impressive interview regarding acceptable vs unacceptable slaughtering practices. Interview with Dr. Andy Butterworth, BSc, BVSc, PhD(Bristol), CertWel, CBiol, MIBiol, MRCVS, Senior Lecturer in Animal Sciences, Senior Research Fellow. —Andy, can you describe why this killing method is inhumane? —Dr. Butterworth: This is a method that would not be permitted in any agreed commercial slaughter process. For instance, the method adopts the use of a metal rod to cause damage to the back part of the skull and to the spinal cord. At the same time it damages the blood vessels in that area. Any established and agreed standards for slaughter in slaughter houses now have gone very far away from severance of the spinal cord and now demand that animals are made immediately unconscious before another method is used to kill them. So this method is very far away from established practice for humane slaughter in many developed countries. —What is it about the design of this device that makes its use so inhumane? —Dr. Butterworth: It’s a device specifically designed to cause damage to the spinal cord and to the blood vessels – to the back part of the skull, but because of its design for this specific purpose, it fails in many other areas in terms of its humane application. For a start, it does not induce immediate insensibility. The cause of death is likely to be paralysis or profound blood loss. These are not mechanisms that we routinely accept now for humane slaughter. —If a dolphin has to be killed in the case of humane euthanasia, how is that done? —Dr. Butterworth: If an animal is, for instance, stranded and it’s judged that it’s required that it’s euthanized in a humane fashion, then most veterinarians choose to use some kind of lethal injection. That would be usually an overdose of some kind of barbiturate or it could be another agent that represses the respiratory and cognizant systems and those agents are very well recognized in the way that they function. They cause the animal to first become unconscious and then to die. That’s what a vet would choose to use for a companion animal , for a dog or horse, for instance when that was possible. If barbiturates cannot be used, then it would be common … to use some method that causes the very rapid insensibility of the animal and that would usually mean something like shooting the animal – in the brain – to destroy the function of that organ very rapidly. The method that we’re seeing here in this particular case does not achieve any of those things. It doesn’t achieve the gentle [barbiturate death or the instant death of a shot to the brain]. It falls short in both of those particular choice areas. ….. —How do these hunts compare with the slaughter of other animals in Japan and in other modern countries? —Dr. Butterworth: Japan is a developed country. It has a well developed system of legislation for protecting animals in various areas and in line with the requirements for humane slaughter in many other species. This method falls far short. the use of a device to cut the spinal cord has been outlawed in the majority of developed countries because it was clear that that method simply paralyzed the animal without but didn’t bring about a rapid death. So most humane slaughter relies on the idea that you make the animal unconscious as soon as is possible. Now that means in a very short time usually, in such short time that the animal has only the shortest potential period for suffering. And that method then, the stunning method is what I’m describing, that stunning method is usually followed rapidly by a method that kills the animal while its unconscious. This method does not do that. It does not stun the animal quickly and it does not bring about death very rapidly, so it falls short in those two basic requirements. If you’ve got to do it at all, do it so that the animal has the absolute minimum potential for suffering during that period of time and this method does not fulfill that requirement. —Is it fair to compare wild hunting with commercial killing in a slaughter house? —Dr. Butterworth: What happens in this case is that the animals are first gathered in. They are brought into a controlled environment – they’re brought under a tent, effectively in a cove. They are often controlled by a rope around the tail stalk and so they’re brought into a very closely confined and controlled environment. This is not a hunt in the sense that the animals are a long distance from the hunters…the hunter in this case is standing alongside the animal with a means to kill it. In that respect, I think this very closely resembles a commercial slaughter and also the products are sold for commercial purposes. So all aspects of this particular kill and kill method seems to me to be much more closely aligned with a commercial slaughter process than with a traditional view of the hunt….In this case, he’s very close to the animal and therefore has the capacity to do it, if it must be done at all, in a very controlled and careful way and my concern is that’s not what we’re seeing in this particular case. A Different Approach Please note that I am unfamiliar with this particular company. The concept of Eco-tourism – Outstanding! A human-worthy…humane and earth-friendly way to experience dolphins as opposed to supporting captivity with purchases of marine park tickets.
