We'll kill dolphins kindly: Japanese

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The Australian

 

We'll kill dolphins kindly: Japanese

By Stephen Lunn, Tokyo correspondent

 

August 29, 2002

 

TO some it might seem like an oxymoron, but the local

fishermen in Ito, a traditional dolphin-hunting town

southwest of Tokyo, have promised to adopt a more

humane dolphin slaughtering method, starting from this

year.

 

" By severing the dolphins' spinal cord with a knife in

a specially built slaughterhouse at dockside, we will

be able to shorten the time of death from 10 minutes

to about 30 seconds, " the managing director of Ito

Fishermen's Co-operative, Hiromasa Kide, said

yesterday.

 

Mr Kide said coastal dolphin hunters traditionally

took their catch live to the slaughterhouse at the

docks, where the dolphins were cut open and sliced up

with huge knives until they died, a process that took

about 10 minutes.

 

Despite the Japanese Fisheries Agency allotting a

quota of 600 dolphins a year to the 2000-member

co-operative in Ito and its surrounds, Mr Kide said

there had been no dolphins taken in the region since

1999, but he conceded no altruistic reasons were

involved.

 

" It is simply because we have not seen any pods of

dolphins along our coastal waters, " he said.

 

Dolphin flesh is sometimes sold as whale-meat in

Japanese restaurants, but Mr Kide said in the Ito

region such mislabelling was not necessary because

locals loved dolphin meat.

 

The fishermen's promise to slaughter their allocated

dolphin take with more concern for the animal's

welfare came on the day the Johannesburg environment

conference agreed to set fishing limits to restore

most major global fisheries to commercial health by

2015.

 

But conservationists were hardly impressed by the

Japanese fishing group's concession.

 

" Making dolphin slaughtering more humane, as they say,

makes little difference because we are opposed to

hunting coastal dolphins from the start, " said Nanami

Kurosawa, a spokeswoman for the Tokyo-based green

group the Dolphin and Whale Network.

 

" Ito's key industry is tourism. To local people,

hunting dolphin should be far less important than

tourism, " Ms Kurosawa said of the region, which is

becoming famous for its onsen, or mineral bath,

resorts.

 

High levels of mercury have been discovered in the

meat from coastal dolphins in recent years, Ms

Kurosawa said, making it dangerous for human

consumption, particularly by pregnant women and ill

people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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