In Taiji, Japan, each year comes the tragic season of dolphin hunting, an event which is repeated with the same cruelty and which results in the extermination of entire families of these marine mammals. A scene filmed by the volunteers of the Dolphin Project difficult to watch without being able to hold back a feeling of rage: hunters chased for hours a pack of pilot dolphins, then led them into shallow water. Once surrounded, the dolphins began to swim in close contact, to comfort each other, before their inevitable sad fate.
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image credit: Dolphin Project
It is yet another episode of violence against these defenseless animals which is repeated. This is because the dolphin hunting season in Japan is the carnage that lasts 6 months a year. During one of these many moments of the hunt, the moving scene was filmed in which the leader of the pack swims close to the rest of the dolphins, in an attempt to comfort them before the tragedy.
The hapless family of dolphins was left alone overnight, confined in the bay by nets, but the next day the hunters returned to the scene, just after dawn to complete the work. The dolphins still swam “in close contact with each other to try to figure out what was going on” until the hunters started to select the individuals.
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image credit: Dolphin Project
Moments of frenzy, where the dolphins fidgeted to escape the hunters but moved closer to each other to stay united. Eight of them were selected to be captive-bred, while the last group of prisoners was left out, on the shore of the bay, until a boat arrived to take them away – that’s where the massacre began.
The process of slaughtering these poor beasts is long and painful because of their size, hunters divide the slaughter into several stages – thus, individuals still alive are forced to swim in bloody waters, while ‘they helplessly witness the murder of their families.
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image credit: Dolphin Project
A despicable tradition that endures over time, but which has nothing human: there is nothing to justify such cruelty which, we hope, will soon end.
source used: Dolphin Project