Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy Green ©2000-2004 Canadian Mind Products.
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17,000 Dolphins About To Be Slaughtered

Fishermen in central Japan are set to begin hunting dolphins, an annual event which comes around every autumn. This year, however, the activity might trigger controversy after the recent international outcry over Japan's whaling programme. The dolphin hunting season officially got under way on Sunday in the small port town of Taiji - the traditional home of Japanese whaling - some 450km southwest of Tokyo. Poor weather has prevented fishermen from going out to sea so far, but they plan to catch a total of nearly 2,400 dolphins and smaller species of whales during the season, which runs until the end of April, a local official said. Both whaling and dolphin hunting are traditions that date back hundreds of years in Japanese society. But unlike Japan's whaling programme, which Tokyo says is for scientific research purposes, dolphins are hunted purely to provide meat for consumption, a Fisheries Agency official said. The hunt was being carried out in accordance with International Whaling Commission (IWC) rules, according to the Fisheries Agency official, adding that strict quotas were set each year. In addition to Taiji, dolphin hunting is allowed at several other ports and a total of nearly 17 000 dolphins are caught every season. This is a clipping of an article from the Internet Africa News Website (used here with permission). The subject of this article is so appalling that I decided to try and do something about it. Hopefully this email will make it's way to others that feel similarly.

Links

Circulate a petition from stoptheslaughter@hotmail.com.
Roedy Green's essay 2004-06-28 on cetacean intelligence.
Dr. John Lilly's essay on brain weight versus body weight and cetacean intelligence.
Buy full size framed or unframed dolphin posters such as these from allwall.com:

You can have quite a bit of fun choosing frames and mattes and seeing what they would look like. You can even what the picture would look like on your wall.
Success! The whale hunt was banned. Let's do the same for dolphins.
reader feedback on this essay.

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