There is a small Japanese town with a very dark secret: every year from September to February, the town opens up dolphin hunting season. Nearly one thousand dolphins will meet their demise in this one cove in the Japanese Kii peninsula, which makes it the largest annual cull of cetaceans in the world.
In total, environmentalists estimate that about 26,000 dolphins around coastal Japan will be killed, with the town of Taiji at the center of the slaughter.
The town claims the dolphin slaughter is necessary for economic purposes. The dolphins are slaughtered and sold to food processing plants which distribute the meat around the world. The Japan Times reports that defenders of the dolphin killing say it is a tradition and point out that the animals it targets are not endangered, a position echoed by the Japanese government. They say Western objections are hypocritical and ignore the vastly larger number of cows, pigs and sheep butchered to satisfy demand elsewhere. But critics of the practice say there is insufficient demand for the animals’ meat, which, in any case, contains dangerous levels of mercury. Therefore, many companies mislabel the dolphin meat as whale to encourage consumer purchasing of the product.
The 2014-2015 hunting season is expected to be similar to last year’s season, in which, according to the charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), some 850 dolphins of mixed species were killed, while more than 150 were taken alive for captivity. However, the dolphin killing is kept as quiet as possible, with many of the coves covered in large sheets so that photos and video can not be taken of the dolphin mass killing. This makes it difficult to truly calculate the exact number of dolphins killed each year in these secret coves. Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) notes that over 20,000 dolphins are killed annually along the Japanese coast. Source: http://www.inquisitr.com
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