Video: How Japan Now Hunts Dolphins in Taiji

Filmed by Kunito Seko

Edited by Jillian Surdilla

WARNING: This video includes graphic footage of the killing of dolphins, and so may be disturbing to viewers.

Watch the Video:

Jillian Surdilla edited a short video using last season’s footage from Taiji's dolphin drive hunt, provided by Kunito Seko, Taiji resident and dolphin activist. Additional clips were gathered from the Oceanic Preservation Society's The Cove and undercover footage coordinated by a German filmmaker and an International Marine Mammal Project (IMMP) Cove Monitor, courtesy of Whale & Dolphin Conservation.

This video aims to highlight changes in the dolphin hunts since The Cove, released in 2009, was filmed. Previously, dolphins were speared and then taken to a slaughterhouse. Now, they are dragged under tarps, killed with a spike behind the blowhole, and once again taken to be processed. This new dispatching method often results in the dolphins suffering from slow and painful deaths.

A significant development is that fewer and fewer dolphins are being killed. This is due to local concerns about mercury and PCBs in dolphin meat at levels much higher than Japan’s health standards for human consumption (publicized by IMMP and other organizations).

For more information on IMMP’s Save Japan Dolphins Campaign, go here.

About Jillian:

Jillian Surdilla is currently an intern with IMMP and is also a student at UC Berkeley. In her third year of university, she joined IMMP to play a hands-on role in cetacean advocacy. As a Psychology major, she intends to use her academic background and focus on marketing as means to spread awareness of pressing issues concerning marine mammal rights. Currently, she is working to publicly champion the SWIMS Act, which is the first piece of US legislation to potentially prohibit the capture, breeding, transport and display of various small whales for entertainment.

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In 2004, the International Marine Mammal Project (IMMP) of Earth Island Institute launched our Save Japan Dolphins Campaign. While the hunts continue, the number of dolphins being

killed for food has substantially declined, in large part due to consumer concerns in Japan about contamination of dolphin meat by mercury, PCBs, and other pollutants. IMMP and other organizations have publicized the threat, protested the killing of sentient dolphins for food, and advocated to end the captures of dolphins to be sold to aquariums for miserable lives in captivity. This trade in live dolphins is the main financial driver of the hunts. You can help stop the dolphin captures, preserve dolphin families and pods, and restore Japan’s dolphin populations. Please donate to protect dolphins and whales and their ocean homes. Thank you!