Urge Japanese Govt. to Place Warning Labels on Poisoned Dolphin Meat

[Linda]

I hope it's alright with everyone but I made a separate discussion on the killing of these precious Dolphins because I didn't want the cry for help from the Dolphins to get lost. I feel this should be an urgent cause for attention as well.

Urge Japanese Govt. to Place Warning Labels
on Poisoned Dolphin Meat

Take Action to help save dolphins by increasing consumer awareness

PRECIOUS DOLPHIN

DOLPHIN BLOOD BATH

BLOOD BATH OF DOLPHINS BEING COVERED BY TARPS

Every year in small towns along the Japanese coast, fishermen conduct drive fisheries to massacre about 20,000 marine mammals in the most brutal way imaginable. They herd whole pods of dolphins, porpoises, and small whales into shallow bays, then slaughter them using sharp spears and hooks. Most are butchered for meat that is sold in restaurants and supermarkets, while a few are sold alive to marine parks where they spend decades in loneliness and deprivation.

As a member of the Save Japan Dolphins Coalition, we at IDA are often asked: "What can I do to help?" Recently, our colleagues at Elsa Nature Conservancy came up with a fresh, new approach to that urgent question.

We are asking the Japanese Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare to put a warning label on all dolphin meat, because laboratory tests show that it is contaminated with dangerously-high levels of mercury, a poison that can cause permanent neurological damage and even death. At this time we are not asking the minister to deal with the issues of food culture or animal cruelty, but simply requesting a warning label for dolphin meat, similar to the one that's placed on every package of cigarettes sold in Japan.

If the warning label system is implemented, it should have a major impact on the demand for dolphin meat. Who is going to buy this questionable product with its warning label attached? Yes, people still buy cigarettes despite the warning label, but cigarettes are extremely addictive -- dolphin meat is not.

Take Action to urge the Japanese Minister of Health to prohibit the sale of dolphin meat that contains mercury exceeding maximum allowable levels, and to require manufacturers to post a warning label on each dolphin meat package.

Copy and paste this link to take action:

http://ga0.org/campaign/warninglabel/n2pm8mx8k?

In Defense of Animals, located in San Rafael, Calif., is an international animal protection organization with more than 85,000 members and supporters dedicated to ending the abuse and exploitation of animals by protecting their rights and welfare. IDA's efforts include educational events, cruelty investigations, boycotts, grassroots activism, and hands-on rescue through our sanctuaries in Mississippi and Cameroon, Africa.

In Defense of Animals is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We welcome your feedback and appreciate your donations. Please join today! All donations to IDA are tax-deductible.

In Defense of Animals
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[e-mail]

[Linda]

Help Stop the Largest and Cruelest
Slaughter of Dolphins in the World!

http://www.savejapandolphins.org/

In the Japanese fishing village of Taiji, fishermen are rounding up and slaughtering hundreds and even thousands of dolphins right now.

After driving pods of dolphins into shallow coves, the fishermen kill the dolphins, slashing their throats with knives or stabbing them with spears. Thrashing about, the dolphins take as long as six minutes to die. The water turns red with their blood and the air fills with their screams.

This brutal massacre — the largest scale dolphin kill in the world — goes on for six months of every year. Even more shocking, the captive dolphin industry is an accomplice to the kill.


Click on this graphic to view an animation that explains how the drive
fishery in Taiji operates, as dolphins are rounded up and forced into
shallow water with nets and underwater noise.
Animation by Rattle the Cage Productions.

Taiji – the Killing Zone

Between October 1st - December 13th 2004 the fishermen of Taiji reported the capture 609 dolphins (389 bottlenose dolphins and 220 Risso’s dolphins) to the Fisheries section of Wakayama Prefecture. While most of the 609 dolphins were slaughtered for human consumption, dolphin trainers selected some of the young and unblemished dolphins for use in captive dolphin swim programs and dolphin shows.


A huge amount of blood is swirling with the currents after a
pod of Risso’s dolphins has been eradicated in the most
gruesome way imaginable. The dolphins fought for their lives
even as their guts were ripped from their bellies and blood
gushed out of their blowholes.
Photo by Genna Naccache
During the hunting season that began October 1st 2003 and ended March 30th 2004 the fishermen of Taiji killed 1,165 dolphins:

444 Striped dolphins
197 bottlenose dolphins
102 Pantropical spotted dolphins
293 Risso’s dolphins
117pilot whales
12 false killer whales

In that same period they captured 78 dolphins for sale to dolphinaria:

67 bottlenose dolphins
6 Risso’s dolphins
5 pseudo orcas

A measure of our success

Japanese fishermen kill the largest number of dolphins anywhere in the world and dolphins and porpoises face grave danger in Japan’s coastal waters when the annual hunt begins. This year the drive fishery, a method in which dolphins are forced ashore and hacked to death, has taken place in Taiji and Futo. We traveled to both of these fishing villages to document the massacres and expose them to the world.

In Taiji the annual dolphin hunt starts October 1st and continues through March 30th. Here, the massacre of dolphins is strongly encouraged by three local dolphinariums that purchase show-quality dolphins at a high cost and ship some of them off to othe facilities in Japan and abroad.


The slaughterhouse is covered with blue tarp
to prevent us from videotaping the bloody scene.
Photo by Helene O’Barry
We were able to film the entire capture procedure in January last year when more than 100 bottlenose dolphins were forced ashore and some 20 dolphins selected by dolphinaria. Several dolphins were killed during the selection process and our powerful footage was recently aired by the BBC in a documentary entitled "Dolphin Hunters" and has been viewed by more than 300 million people worldwide.

This kind of major international exposure is the last thing the fishermen and the dolphin captivity industry want, and it came as no surprise to us that they were fuming with anger upon our return to Taiji in October.

Since the beginning of our campaign to expose the barbaric methods used to capture and kill dolphins, the fishermen have gone to extreme effort and expense to prevent us from carrying out our documentary work. What they are doing to the dolphins is so brutal; they know they have to conceal it from the rest of the world to avoid a huge international outcry.


The fishermen have driven a large pod of bottlenose
dolphins into

[Linda]

Taiji Dolphin Killers Accused of Selling Poison Meat
Japanese government officials say eating "toxic waste" is a serious health hazard

The newspaper Japan Times recently ran a story about Junichiro Yamashita and Hisato Ryono, two city council members from the whaling town of Taiji who publicly condemned the consumption of mercury-poisoned pilot whale meat, especially as it is used in Japan's school lunch programs. World-renowned dolphin expert Ric O'Barry and Sakae Hemi from the Save Japan Dolphins Coalition, of which IDA is a member, deserve much of the credit for breaking this amazing and unprecedented front-page story.

This is the first time that Japanese elected officials have openly stated that dolphin meat is unfit to eat because it contains dangerously high levels of mercury and methylmercury, which can cause irreversible brain damage and severe birth defects. Yamashita and Ryono bought dolphin meat samples at area supermarkets and brought them to a lab for testing, the results of which shocked them so much that they referred to the marine mammal flesh as "toxic waste."

All of the meat samples were contaminated, and the mercury in one of them was more than 15 times higher than the Japanese health ministry's advisory level, and had 12 times as much methylmercury. This amount of mercury is more deadly than was found in some of the seafood tested during Japan's Minamata poisoning epidemic of the 1950s, which ultimately claimed over 1,700 lives. Dr. Shigeo Ekino, a world-renowned Minamata researcher, told reporters that "Everyone should avoid eating dolphin meat. If people continue to eat dolphin, there's a high probability of them having damage to their brains."

The Japanese government has known about the health risks posed by dolphin meat for years, and is legally bound to take it off the market when the mercury content exceeds the official advisory level. However, despite warnings from scientists and now Japanese legislators, the government refuses to protect their citizens' health by standing up to the dolphin meat industry. On the contrary, the government continues to support Taiji's plan to construct a new dolphin meat processing facility, and has no plans to strike dolphin meat from school cafeteria menus, even though Japan's largest supermarket chain permanently removed dolphin meat from their stores earlier this year.

What You Can Do

- The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is an international treaty protecting dolphins and other wildlife from extinction due to over-exploitation and international trade. Please "Take Action" to urge CITES to halt the trafficking of live dolphins.

- While people's health is seriously threatened by dolphin meat consumption, the drive fisheries taking place every year in Japan cause unimaginable suffering for the dolphins and whales herded into harbors and sliced open with knives. See for yourself in a short video produced by the Save the Japan Dolphins coalition. Be aware that some of the imagery is very graphic.

Learn more about IDA's efforts to stop the Japanese drive fisheries.

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[Linda]

Japanese Supermarket Chain Permanently Bans Dolphin Meat
IDA and Save Japan Dolphins Coalition continue to fight cruel slaughter

As we reported in last week's eNews, Japan's largest grocery store chain, the Okuwa Supermarket Corporation, announced that they would no longer sell dolphin meat in their stores based on tests that showed it to be poisoned with high levels of mercury, which can cause irreversible brain damage and severe birth defects. We are now pleased to inform our readers that Okuwa has since decided to officially make the ban permanent as long as the health risks remain. Okuwa is a conglomerate made up of not only supermarkets, but also movie theaters, hotels, sports clubs, and amusement parks, and therefore has enormous influence over the country's economy.

Much of the dolphin meat sold in Japanese supermarkets and restaurants is obtained from dolphins who are slaughtered en masse during the drive fisheries that take place in coastal towns every year from October through March. More than 20,000 dolphins, porpoises and small whales are killed annually as fishermen surround pods of migrating marine mammals and bang on metal rods underwater to disrupt their sonar and herd the animals into shallow bays. The fishermen then proceed to slaughter the helpless cetaceans with sharp spears and hooks and drag their carcasses to a nearby processing plant.

One of the centers of the massacre is the town of Taiji, home of the Taiji Whale Museum, where visitors can go on a whale watching expedition in a dolphin-shaped boat before dining on dolphin and whale meat in a restaurant that displays dozens of posters showcasing the different types of ocean cetaceans. In this fishing village that has about 500 fishermen, only 26 participate in the drive fishery. The town was made internationally infamous by the documentary "Welcome to Taiji", which shows shocking footage of the bloody slaughter. Excerpts of the film are available for viewing on YouTube. Documenting the slaughter is becoming ever more difficult, as the slaughter site in Taiji is relatively isolated, and the fishermen have taken to erecting barriers made of large tarps to hide their shame.

The script for "Welcome to Taiji" was written by Ric O'Barry and his wife Helene. Ric O'Barry is best known as the trainer of the five dolphins who starred as Flipper in the popular 1960s television show of the same name. In 1970, after Cathy (the main "actor" who portrayed Flipper) died in his arms, he realized that it was cruel to train dolphins to perform tricks for people's amusement, and promptly became one of the world's foremost dolphin advocates and marine environmentalists. The O'Barrys were also instrumental in convincing Okuwa to ban dolphin meat from their stores, as was journalist Boyd Harnell, who initiated the random meat sample tests.

IDA has long been at the forefront of the international effort to end the Japanese drive fisheries, teaming up with the Animal Protection Institute, Earth Island Institute, the Elsa Nature Conservatory and One Voice to form the Save Japan Dolphins coalition. As an active member of this major campaign, we have joined with Earth Island Institute to coordinate numerous protests outside Japanese Consulates on Japan Dolphin Day and held major press conferences to break this important story to the media.

Over the years, we have also sent people to Japan to document the slaughter, including Hardy Jones and the late Ben White, who once dove under water at night to cut the nets in Taiji, single-handedly freeing at least a dozen imprisoned dolphins. IDA also helped Jones and White attend the International Whaling Commission symposium to raise their voices against the massacre of cetaceans. In 1993, IDA and Earth Island Institute took successful legal action under the Marine Mammal Protection Act against the importation of False Killer Whales captured in the Japanese drive fishery to Marine World in Vallejo. This was the major precedent to stop imports from drive fisheries to marine parks in the U.S.

The banning of dolphin meat from Okuwa's stores represents a major step in the joint effort to end the drive fisheries. IDA and all members of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition are grateful to the Okuwa Supermarket chain for removing this cruel and contaminated product from their shelves. IDA is dedicated to continuing to work with our allies to bring about a day when dolphins are no longer brutally massacred along the Japanese coast.

What You Can Do:

1) Read a recent article from the British newspaper The Independent entitled "Bloodbath: Japan's dolphin cull gets underway".

2) Write to the Japanese Ambassador to the U.S. to demand a permanent end to the drive fisheries and the preservation of dolphins and whales. Please always be polite and respectful in your correspondence.

Ryozo Kato
Japanese Ambassador to the U.S.
2520 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20008
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

Learn more about the Japanese dolphin slaughter at SaveJapanDolphins.org.

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