Dolphin Meat

[Guchi_Jnr]

Nearly every day since the first week in September, fishermen have been driving pods of dolphins into quiet coves near the village of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, to kill them for their meat, whatever the mercury content, or sell them to marine parks.

Each year, between 2,000 and 3,000 dolphins are taken in Taiji, a little more than 10 percent of Japan's dolphin catch. Among the species killed there so far this season, which runs until March, have been bottlenose and risso dolphins.



Once herded into a holding cove and closed in with large nets, the dolphins swam in circles to protect the females and any young able to keep up. The young separated from the group were left to die of starvation or to be eaten by sharks.

The animals were left for one night in the cove so the stress-related hormones leave their bodies, making their meat more tender, and skiffs and longboats arrived at daybreak and herded the dolphins into an adjacent cove. There, a few were taken out to be sold to aquariums.

Then the longboat crews began to kill the dolphins. They cut the throats of the remaining dolphins or stabbed them randomly, a method animal rights activists call barbaric. Experts, including a former hunter, have said random stabbing results in excruciating death that can take as long as six minutes.


As nice as Japan can be, they really do some seriously fucked up things.

[aimaime]

not only japan though. we humans are an ugly bunch

we destroyed and are destroying ourselves and everything around us..

[Tyler_Wood_2005]

It's just a process to get food, we all need to eat, even the Japanese.

Why don't those animal rights activists complain about the 10s of thousands of cattle we kill each year to get our beef, hamburger and so on.
Or the thousands of pigs we slaughter to get our bacon and other pig products.

Or how about the baby chicks we steal from their chicken mothers so we can get our wide variety of eggs.

This dolphin thing isn't any different, Dolphins are just cuter and seem more friendly their other animals.

[ohbahsan]

Mmmm sounds delicious. I'd sure like to try dolphin meat, but the mercury content is scary :ONscared:

[chera]

This is wrong on so many levels:

 - Dolphins and many other cetaecians are endangered.  We fucked that family to the brink of extinction over the last couple hundred years by overharvesting them for their oil and meat.
 - Dolphins are the most intelligent of sea mammals.  It's like eating chimp meat.
 - The method of slaughter and hearding is counter productive.  Why leave them for a night and wait for the stress hormones to subside if you're just going to stab them indiscriminately?  Dolphins are highly social animals, and the smell of dolphin blood probably stresses them out like mad.  That makes for even more stress hormones, making for poor tasting meat.  Any that are sold to marine parks are likely mentally unstable as a result.
 - Don't forget: they are wild animals, not domestic animals.  It's quite fine for us to indiscriminately kill mass quantities of domestic cows, chickens, etc.  But for wild animals, it's better to spare the young and the pregant, and focus on older animals those who have already reached sexual maturity.  It's hunting practices like the Japanese's that nearly brought whales to extinction.
 - Who wants to end up like the Pieta of Minamata?

[77777777]

i wonder what does dolphin meat taste like.

[Zhanmadao]

its sushi.

[Guchi_Jnr]

A Japanese fishing boat on the latest Simpsons.


Translates as "Dolphin Killer".

[reine]

yeah it happens and not only in Japan. Bottlenose Dolphin(and risso AFAIK) are not endangered species though.  although it's still cruel to kill them like that. Does dolphin taste that good?

[nazokage]

How Sad i love Dolphins i think Flyp should go Protest i mean he has gotta be realated to flyper the Dolphin right?

[Daisuki Daiiyo]

Dolphins and Cows/Chickens are different. The day cows start flipping out of the water, and *jumping over small children to reach their freedom in the ocean, then I'll start getting mad about them being hunted too, but until then, I disapprove.

They could atleast improve upon the hunting methods, I mean hunting the children and mothers aswell? And random stabbing? Oh Japan.

* - Albeit that was a Whale, but whatev.

[robytronix]

Shit.... does tuna come from dolphins??? I just heard that it''s legal to hunt any whales, and any amount of them, in finland and japan. Sad.

[JFC]

^ Tuna comes from Tuna. *gasp*

[StreakInTheSky]

This is wrong on so many levels:

 - Dolphins and many other cetaecians are endangered.  We fucked that family to the brink of extinction over the last couple hundred years by overharvesting them for their oil and meat.
 - Dolphins are the most intelligent of sea mammals.  It's like eating chimp meat.
 - The method of slaughter and hearding is counter productive.  Why leave them for a night and wait for the stress hormones to subside if you're just going to stab them indiscriminately?  Dolphins are highly social animals, and the smell of dolphin blood probably stresses them out like mad.  That makes for even more stress hormones, making for poor tasting meat.  Any that are sold to marine parks are likely mentally unstable as a result.
 - Don't forget: they are wild animals, not domestic animals.  It's quite fine for us to indiscriminately kill mass quantities of domestic cows, chickens, etc.  But for wild animals, it's better to spare the young and the pregant, and focus on older animals those who have already reached sexual maturity.  It's hunting practices like the Japanese's that nearly brought whales to extinction.
 - Who wants to end up like the Pieta of Minamata?

QUOTED JUST BECAUSE IT NEEDS TO BE!

Dolphins are one of the only animals other than humans thought to be able empathize with others, meaning they can actually have a sense of what others are feeling. So to kill other dolphins so brutally in front of another is not much different than someone to brutally kill all your friends and family in front of you. You can see how much of a community a pod of dolphins are as they're actually trying to save the women and children. A dolphin is not a fish, a chicken, or a cow. They are as different to them as we are.

@ Tyler: nobody said the way people fuck with domestic animals was right either. You can't justify the slaughter of dolphins using that false argument. But that's a different story.


@ Guchi: thanks for the simpson's cap I remember reading that but didn't know what it said.


I have no idea what dolphin tastes like, but I doubt people eat it because of the taste