Japan Resumes Controversial Dolphin Slaughter Today

Anyone who has seen the Academy Award-winning documentary, The Cove, is familiar with Japan's annual dolphin hunt. This year's season starts today and runs through February, during which time Japanese fishermen can legally kill up to 20,000 dolphins. Many of those deaths take place in Taiji, a coastal community with a 400-year-old tradition of rounding up dolphins to sell to aquariums or slaughter for their meat. The town was the focal point of The Cove, and since the film was released, Taiji's taken a lot of heat from animal rights' activists.

After viewing the literal bloodbath that ensues in the film, it's easy to understand why activists feel so enraged. Using the "oikomi" method of hunting, fishermen round up dolphins into a bay, capture some, and kill the rest for meat. While fishermen insist their local economy is dependent on this cultural tradition, animal rights activists describe the practice as barbaric, cruel, and inhumane.

Dolphin and whale hunting in Japan is certainly a time-honored tradition. And yes, after seeing the waters run red in The Cove, the hunts can be pretty horrific. But from a sustainable foodie perspective, there's a problem even more disturbing than the slaughter itself — dolphins' and whales' toxicity. Both of these swimmers contain astronomical levels of the heavy metal, mercury.

Both the Japanese government and fishermen do their best to downplay the serious health concerns associated with eating whale and dolphin meat. "Westerners eat cows, Australians eat kangaroos," Miyato Sugimori, the administrative chief of Taiji's Fisheries Association told Bloomberg News. "Japan, including Taiji, is surrounded by ocean, so we eat things from the sea which include fish, whales, and dolphins. There's nothing wrong with that."

Sorry, Sugimori, but comparing dolphin meat to beef is an apples-to-oranges analogy, and there is something very wrong with that. Dolphins and small whales typically reside at the top of oceanic food chains. That means they tend to bioaccumulate mercury with every smaller fish they consume. Being a big fish may get dolphins all the dinner they want, but it makes the swimmers a poor choice as a dish for humans to dine on. Eating too much mercury can cause numbness, fatigue, birth defects, brain damage, and even death. The symptoms are even more severe for children and pregnant women because kids' and fetuses' brains and bodies are still developing, leaving them more susceptible to damages.

What's worse is that if any country should be intimately familiar with the dangers of mercury poisoning, it's Japan. Back in the 1950s, a chemical company spewed tons of mercury compounds in the Minamata region of the country. Thousands of citizens were killed, sickened, or crippled by exposure to the heavy metal, experiencing spasms, sensory loss, and limb malformations in newborns, according to The Guardian.

Despite this piece of not-so-distant history, Japan's Health and Agriculture Ministries do little to inform citizens about the dangers of consuming dolphin and whale meat. The gross negligence is certainly taking a toll: A study conducted earlier this year found that Taiji residents who dined on dolphin and whale displayed significantly higher-than-normal levels of mercury in their bodies. Fishy how even after the Minamata incident sickened thousands, the Japanese government blissfully ignores the potential health hazards of eating mercury-laden whale and dolphin meat.

We can debate the animal rights-versus-cultural tradition aspect of Japan's dolphin hunting until the cows — er, fish — come home. But if a custom actually endangers folks' health, it's time to cut the cultural ties and switch to safe, healthy food sources. Sign this petition asking Taiji to end its dolphin slaughter and start protecting the well-being of its citizens.

Photo credit: Just Taken Pics via Flickr