Word: dolphined
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...marine-mammal experts says the Langseth may have done more harm than good during its nearly four-month tour. The area where the ship was sailing is home to about 34 cetacean species, of which seven are fragile marine-mammal species, like the critically endangered Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin that lives along a 60-mile (100 km) stretch of Taiwan's west coast. "Seismic airguns are very loud, and under certain circumstances they can cause actual physical damage," says Rose. "When a species such as the humpback dolphin is already facing many threats and is hovering on the brink...
...Cove's central points, however, is not as open for cultural interpretation. Dolphin meat - like whale - contains high levels of mercury, and at its highest instances, the concentration of methyl mercury in bottlenose dolphin meat is 32 times the limit set by Japan's Health Ministry. School children in Taiji eat dolphin, like the rest of the town's population. Junichiro Yamashita, who years ago raised national awareness of dolphin meat's health risks as Taiji's local assemblyman, was interviewed for the film along with current assemblyman Hisato Ryono. But Ryono, who was touted as a hero...
...dramatic effect, The Cove casts Taiji's dolphin hunt as one town's dirty secret. The reality, however, is that Japan culls about 20,000 dolphins across the nation every year. To those in Taiji and other areas where dolphin hunting is permitted, the global reaction to The Cove has a whiff of the enduringly contentious whaling debate (Japan has hunted whales in the name of science for decades despite environmentalists' ire). The new wave of criticism of dolphin hunting that has been spurred by the film has many fishermen and local bureaucrats rolling their eyes over what they interpret...
...Meanwhile, the people of Taiji, pop. circa 3,400, believe they have been unfairly singled out. While Taiji has a 400-year history of whale and dolphin hunting, its fishermen catch less than 20% of Japan's yearly dolphin quota. Iwate prefecture catches the most of any area, bringing in a total of 11,070 dolphins in 2006 and 10,218 in 2007. But even those figures are well below the prefecture's legal limits, and Taiji fishermen also hunted about half their limit in 2006 and 2007, averaging about 1,430 dolphins a year. In response to The Cove...
...Almost all the dolphins caught in Japan are sold for meat near the towns where they're caught, and only 1% - a few dozen - are sold live to aquariums. Masashi Nishimura, manager of the Japan Fisheries Association's international section, who also works with environmental issues, says most Japanese people don't know much about the dolphin hunts. "I don't think it's a big topic here," he says. "As long as [their killing] is humane, dolphins are like other animals to us." The most humane technique, according to Nishimura, would be to use high-tech machines to minimize...