cúisle mo chroí

I watched the documentary film “The Cove” last night, which has apparently been nominated for an Academy Award this year. It has been a while since I’ve watched any sort of documentary film about animals, and it was particularly interesting to watch now that I would no longer describe myself as an animal rights activist.

Ric O’Barry’s story is heartbreaking. Many will remember O’Barry from the television show Flipper–he is a former dolphin trainer who was responsible for capturing and training the dolphins that were used to play Flipper. As O’Barry describes in the film, he spent 10 years working with dolphins (and is credited for popularizing their as entertainment and so forth) until the first Flipper dolphin, Cathy, died in his arms (a death he labels as suicide from depression). O’Barry did an about-face overnight and has since dedicated his life to freeing dolphins in captivity. The Cove tells the story of the annual dolphin hunt and slaughter in Taiji, Japan, where over 23,000 dolphins are killed each year.

The film is very engaging and well done, and I would definitely recommend watching it. I abhor zoos and aquariums like Sea World, and it is incredible to think about what intelligent creatures dolphins are. I have to add that it was also kind of cool to see a cameo of Hayden Panettiere engaging in some direct action in Taiji. I knew she had a thing for dolphins but that’s as far as my knowledge of her goes.

I do wish, however, that the film had more of a focus on the industry that fuels the annual dolphin slaughters. Why such a focus on the supply side? It doesn’t make much sense, particularly if the goal of the film is to expose the act as a means towards shutting it down.

As important as it is to know and see what the manner in which the dolphins are killed, I thought that the focus shouldn’t have been so heavily on the Japanese community in Taiji. Obviously, that is where the slaughter takes place, but it was odd that there was such an emphasis on the market for dolphin meat, but no real emphasis on the dolphin trade. The film did not even mention which countries import the most dolphins, for example, nor how much money dolphin shows or swimming with dolphin programs generate each year. The Japanese government and the International Whaling Commission were depicted as the enemies in the film…yet where was Sea World, for example, in all of this? As someone with an environmental background, I couldn’t help but think that the perspective/narrow focus of the film fits right in with what I feel to be the limited effectiveness of the mainstream environmental movement in the United States.

Apparently some of those involved in the film offered to subsidize the fisherman, saying that if they were to pay them the same amount of money that they would bring in from the annual hunt, would they agree to forgo it? Their answer was no, because dolphin hunting was part of their culture. In response, the filmmakers went to Tokyo and asked people on the street if eating dolphins was part of Japanese culture, and the response they received was a resounding “No!” Does anyone else see the problem inherent in this?!

And finally–I don’t know about you, but I’ve long since grown weary of listening to Paul Watson talk about anything. I leave you with an excerpt from Conquest by Andrea Smith, in which she writes about the Sea Shepherd Society and the Makah whaling controversy:

The Coalition for Human Dignity documents how animal and environmental rights groups, such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) and the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, collaborated with far-right Republican legislator Jack Metcalf to oppose the Makah. Metcalf has openly spoken at the meetings of overtly racist and anti-Semitic organizations and has called for the abrogation of Indian treaty rights. These groups, instead of developing strategies to negotiate their differences with the Makah that respected Native sovereignty, advocated for the US to abrogate its 1855 treaty with the Makah that guarantees their right to whale hunt. What these “environmentalists” did not consider is that if they had been successful in legitimizing the abrogation of one treaty, it would have the effect of delegitimizing all treaties. They would be destroying the efforts of Native peoples across the country who are opposing corporate control through the use of treaties.