Culture or Cruelty: Dolphin Eating in Japan

As an island, Japanese enjoy eating seafood. Walking into a Japanese restaurants, one might find it hard to not recognize the variety of fish offered as delicious and often raw dishes. While Japanese cuisine is getting attention from all over the world, their dolphin eating habits bring about a whole lot of attention from the press and environmental activists. More than 20,000 dolphins are captured and killed every year, yet the government claimed that dolphins are not endangered species, and therefore eating dolphins in Japan is not only acceptable, but is also important to the livelihood of local villagers in the industry.

In small towns like Taiji, Japan, dolphins fishing requires a major labor force. Every winter during the months of October through March, villagers (who are most likely fishermen) gather together to capture dolphins. They first disorient the dolphins with nets and fishing boats, then deliberately injure one of them (because dolphins never leave their family or friends if one of them is hurt). As the net begins to tighten, fishermen began to lift the dolphins, one by one, onto their fishing boats, and eventually they are delivered to the factory, where they are brutally slaughtered.

After a bloody and violent process of slaughtering, dolphin meat are either sold in the local fresh market, or packaged as canned whale meat that can be found in many nationwide Japanese supermarket.

What bothers so many environmental activists is not the fact that dolphins are being served as foods, it is the brutal and inhumane ways of killing that brought about so much attention and controversies. The captured dolphins are often tied to a truck and dragged to the process factory. While they are still alive, factory workers would cut open their throats with a sharp knife and leave the dolphins there for hours, until they slowly bleed to death. Often times, it takes hours of suffering for them to die.

For more information on dolphin massacre in Taiji, Japan, take a look at this CNN report on dolphin slaughtering and its related video on youtube.


Looking at both sides of the argument, I find it extremely hard to take a stand on this issue. On one hand, an ocean polluted with dolphin's blood is certainly not something I would like to see; but on the other hand, if there are so many dolphins in that region, and that fishing is the major source of income in those villages, they have every right to consume dolphins. If eating living silkworm and roaches on Fear Factor is acceptable to Western audience, Japanese, too, have their points in seeing the art of eating dolphins as part of their culture. My point is this: why isn't the slaughtering of chickens or pigs or cows generate as much of a controversy? Because they are more abundant, or they are intellectually less of a being than dolphins? I am certainly not supporting the cruelty and violence used on animals, but it seems to me that the standard of humanity is extremely vague and ambiguous. While the West often see the oriental East as uncivilized and inhumane, is the French foie gras industry anyway more lenient to the animals when ducks have to be kept in extremely small cages so as to limit their physical activity, and increase the fat accumulate in their livers?

This is a question that posts the double standards of many environmental activists in the West. Indeed, what makes a dish a local culture? When would you define eating that dish as adventurous, or inhumane? That is something we, as human beings, should all think about.