14 DAY TRIAL // Yet another dolphin hunting season is now underway in Taiji, Japan. Like all other seasons before it, this one started in this year's September and will only end come March 2015.
As per usual, members and supporters of environmental group Sea Shepherd are in the area, keeping tabs on the ongoing slaughter. They say that, this past weekend, they witnessed a most disturbing scene.
Thus, it was on Sunday that local fishermen drove a pod of Risso's dolphins to shore and slaughtered about a dozen of the marine mammals. What's more, they took two young dolphins captive.
The incident was nothing short of a massacre
According to Sea Shepherd, these latest killings occurred early in the morning. Members of the organization say that, having driven the pod of dolphins to shore, fishermen butchered as many as 11 marine mammals.
Of the remaining Risso's dolphins, three calves were simply taken back out to sea and abandoned there. The green group says that, now that they no longer have their family to help them find food and look after them, the marine mammals will surely die.
Apart from killing the over a dozen Risso's dolphins and dumping the three calves out at sea, fishermen in Taiji, Japan, captured two young dolphins, one of which is an albino. Sea Shepherd expects that the two dolphins will very soon be sold to a marine park.
“These rare, beautiful, and unique animals will spend the rest of their days confined to small tanks, where they will live out their shortened lives performing tricks for food,” Cove Guardian volunteer Karen Hagen of Norway said in a statement.
The Sea Shepherd volunteers who witnessed this latest series of killings have decided to name the albino dolphin Shiro, which is the Japanese word for “white.” They hope that, should this marine mammal's story get enough attention, Shiro will eventually be saved.
Mind you, this albino dolphin is not the first have until now been taken captive by fishermen in this remote corner of Japan. On the contrary, it was back in January that one other marine mammal of this kind was captured by the same people.
Fishermen in Taiji have until now killed dozens of dolphins
Sea Shepherd says that, since the beginning of this latest hunting season, Japanese fishermen have killed about 170 Risso's dolphins, and even several bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales. Still, it appears that last year's hunt was way more successful.
By the looks of it, the fishermen are having trouble meeting their quota simply because they don't have all that many dolphin and whale pods to pick and choose from. This might sound as good news, but the fact of the matter is that, all things considered, it could be that the reason they can't find all that many dolphins and whales is because there aren't all that many left to find.
“While I am very happy for the dolphins that are not being found, I am very concerned that the reason they are not being found is because these species have been driven toward extinction and depleted from Taiji’s waters,” Sea Shepherd member Melissa Sehgal said in a statement.
