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Dolphins Jumping
Photograph courtesy Lionsgate
August 21, 2009--Trained dolphins perform tricks in Taiji, a small Japanese fishing town, in this undated photo.
But it's Taiji's dead dolphins that have made it infamous among animal rights activists: Every year 2,000 dolphins are corralled into a local cove and stabbed to death with harpoons. Most are sold for food, but about a hundred are taken alive and exported to aquariums in Japan, South Korea, Iran, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. (Read full story.)
The Taiji hunt is the subject of The Cove, a 2009 documentary that follows an international team of activists on their mission to document the hunt.
--Patrick Walters for National Geographic magazineDecember 29, 2009
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Taiji Hunt
Photograph courtesy Brooke McDonald, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society via AP
Bottlenose dolphins lie piled in a boat, and the water runs red with their blood during a hunt near Taiji, Japan, in this 2003 photo.
In April 1979 a photograph of a bottlenose dolphin hunt in Iki, Japan ran in National Geographic magazine--the first time the international press publicized dolphin drive hunting, in which the mammals are corralled into a cove.
The following year, the CBS TV network aired video of the same hunt, and negative international attention led Iki and other towns to give up dolphin hunting by the mid-1980s. But Taiji never stopped.December 29, 2009
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Pilot Whales
Photograph by Andrija Ilic, Reuters
Fishermen in the Faroe Islands (map), an autonomous province of Denmark near Iceland, corral and kill dolphins with knives in May 2009, just as they have done for centuries.
The Faroese hunt doesn't attract the same negative international attention as Taiji's. It's a smaller, less commercial hunt--the meat is distributed evenly among local families, not sold. Other small hunts take place in the Arctic, the Caribbean, Peru, and the Solomon Islands.
Faroese fishermen target pilot whales--technically dolphins but less recognizable than their bottlenose cousins. And the Faroese don't sell their catch to aquariums.
Conservationists warn that the Solomon Islands hunt, while small, may in fact be the world's most worrisome, since the local dolphin population is said to be too small to sustain it.December 29, 2009
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Dall's Porpoises
Photograph by Flip Nicklin, National Geographic Stock
In a photo that ran in National Geographic magazine in September 1992, researchers examine Dall's porpoises taken in a Japanese hunt.
Each year in northern Japan, harpooners kill more than 10,000 Dall's porpoises--a kind of dolphin--to be sold for food.
While global dolphin populations are healthy, numbering more than six million, some scientists fear that certain hunts, including the Dall's hunt, could eventually devastate isolated subpopulations.December 29, 2009
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Packaged Dolphin Meat
Photograph courtesy Ezra Clark, EIA
Dolphin meat isn't widely available in Japan, but it's sold in many rural supermarkets, such as this northern Japanese one pictured in 2003.
Activists who oppose dolphin hunting say it's inhumane to kill the animals, because they show high intelligence, sensitivity, and signs of self-awareness.
So far, Japan appears unlikely to force an end to the Taiji dolphin hunt featured in the 2009 movie The Cove.
"What difference is there between a cow, a pig, and a dolphin?" said Shigeki Takaya, a Japanese official who oversees dolphin hunting.
"People have to respect each other's cultures. In other countries, they eat cow. But we never say to Americans, 'Don't eat a cheeseburger.'"December 29, 2009
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