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Saturday, 03 October 2009 20:43 |
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 Despite the efforts of the Japanese authorities to keep it hidden, the massacre has been captured on film by a guerrilla documentary team led by the man who trained Flipper.
Until now, the yearly slaughter of 2,000 dolphins in a small town in Japan has been one of the country's most shameful secrets. But The Cove – a new documentary shot in the style of an espionage thriller – is about to change all that. The film follows the attempts of an American documentary team to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding the annual dolphin 'drive' in the fishing town of Taiji.
Here, in the drive season between September and March, fishermen set out in motorised vessels to locate the pods of dolphins following their primordial migratory patterns along Japan's south-eastern Pacific coast. Banging on metal poles suspended from the sides of the boats, the fishermen confuse the dolphins' sonar, and drive them into the hidden cove of the film's title. There, dealers size up young females to sell on to marine parks and dolphinaria. The remainder are brutally slaughtered by fishermen using knives and spears in a bloody massacre – which turns the waters red – to be sold either as dolphin, or more often 'whale', meat.... Read Full Article by Mick Brown
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