Japan’s Dolphin Hunt Begins To Much Protest, But Is Western Outrage Hypocritical?
Japan’s controversial dolphin hunt has begun again, and outrage is spreading in the West as animal activists try to stop the annual slaughter. But that’s probably not going to happen.
The Japanese see this outrage as quite hypocritical, especially when it comes from people who regularly eat meat, Shihoko Goto, senior associate for Northeast Asia–Asia Program, told the Christian Science Monitor. For the record, she does not like that Japan hunts and kills both whale and dolphin.
“Appealing to the hearts and minds and emotions isn’t going to get you there if you’re just saying ‘Oh it’s really cruel to kill whales’ which it is, but we as human beings do a lot of cruel things to a lot of animals and this is no different. That is how the Japanese would see it.”
Some background on the hunt: It has taken place for centuries, and the Japanese call it a tradition. The annual hunt happens in Taji for a six-month season, during which people there lure hundreds of dolphins into a cove, where they are either caught or have a metal rod thrust into their spinal cords, NBC News and the Independent reported.
According to the Japan Times, fishermen have to meet a quota set by the country’s fisheries agency. This year’s quota is 1,873; last year, they were supposed to catch just under 2,000 but caught 937. The dolphins are eaten in restaurants, offered in grocery stores, or sold to aquariums around the world.
And that doesn’t sit well with animal lovers.
“During this season, hundreds of sentient, intelligent, communicative animals will be killed in an astonishingly brutal way, and that includes males, females and calves,” said activist and filmmaker Hardy Jones.
Alongside the fisherman, protesters gather every year to speak out against the dolphin hunt, which many see as cruel. Activists want to convince Japan’s aquariums not to purchase a captured Taji dolphin in order to gut the endeavor’s profits (one dolphin can fetch $100,000). But that won’t matter if China, Russia, and other countries keep paying up.
Others want to boycott the 2020 Olympic Games, which will be held in Japan, and others want airlines to ban transporting the animal to other countries. And, of course, many others have taken to social media in the hopes of shifting hearts and minds in Japan.
Save Japan Dolphins appeals to mayor Kazutaka Sangen to end dolphin hunting #SaveJapanDolphins #Taiji #TheCove http://t.co/Wa0ihD7Fi4
— Angelika Sunrise (@AngelinaStoych2) September 3, 2015
But this likely won’t work, Shihoko Goto explained. In Japan, people don’t “anthropomorphize the way Westerners tend (to) do.” To them, in other words, the dolphin is just an animal. More to the point, Westerners hunt and kill animals, too, making their protests — especially from people who eat meat — hollow and hypocritical.
“Criticizing the hunting of whales and dolphins is seen in Japan as a cultural double-standard coming from westerners who say, I can eat cow. I can eat pig. I can shoot deer and glorify it and hunting in general, but I cannot harpoon a whale that is seen as plentiful. If you want to change that dynamic I would say it should dovetail with the anti-hunting campaign, or vegetarianism … Free Willy really never got big in Japan.”
[Photo Courtesy Shutterstock]
