World-renowned Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos Fights Dolphin Slaughter in "The Cove"

It’s no mystery that our seas are in peril. We’ve got ocean acidification, marine litter, and overfishing, to name only a few examples mucking up our beautiful, biodiverse ocean ecosystems.

What you most likely haven’t heard about however is the annual, intentional mass-slaughter of dolphins going on in a cove in Taiji, Japan—an act so heinous, horrifying, heart-wrenching and on the hush-hush that it took a entire crew of daring photographers, filmmakers and eco-activists known as the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) to document and draw attention to it.

The expose culminated in a feature-length documentary called The Cove which recently hit select theaters nation-wide—coinciding perfectly (and coincidentally) with Planet Green’s very own Blue August.

Wishing to dig deeper into this underground marine mammal massacre—why it’s happening, its severity and how we citizens can unite to take action, we caught up with the mastermind behind it all—one of the world’s most prominent still photographers, filmmaker and OPS director, Louie Psihoyos.

The heroic OPS team.

As Jaymi mentions in her post on TreeHugger, 23,000 dolphins are slaughtered each year in Taiji, Japan. Why is this happening?

Tens of thousands of dolphins are being killed every year in Japan for two reasons: greed and secrecy. 

A Japanese fisherman spearing a dolphin.

Greed because the mayor of Taiji and his cronies make a lot of money off of the trafficking of dolphins for the captive dolphin trade. The last sale to Dubai netted the mayor and his gang about $200,000 each for 12 trained dolphins. The dolphin traffickers are usually looking for young, unblemished females and those not selected are taken around to the secret cove and don’t come back out alive. They are cut into little hunks of meat, shrink wrapped and often sold as counterfeit whale meat under the guise of the “Scientific Whale” meat program. Dolphin meat is sold as meat from their larger cetacean cousins, whales, because it can fetch far more money than if they were sold as dolphin meat. Dolphin meat is considered a trash fish because it eats much higher on the food chain than say a Minke Whale in the Antarctic that primarily eats krill. 

The OPS team catches a glimpse of dolphin slaugher from afar.

Secrecy because the average person in Japan isn’t aware this is going on because if they did, I believe it would be stopped. The cove is a heavily fortified natural fortress and even Japanese people don’t know what goes on inside. Above the cover, there are two parks flanking each side it that are part of the Japanese National Park system. The Parks are called Tsunami Parks because they are intended to serve as a refuge for citizens fleeing a tsunami. During the dolphin hunting season however, which lasts more than half of a year beginning September 1 through March, the entrance to the parks are blocked by the mayor’s town barricades. Local thugs patrol them so nobody can look down on the cove. They are so worried about what the Japanese people would witness that they would rather risk the safety of the town’s people. 

What species of dolphin is getting slaughtered and why are these dolphins so important to us—the human race?

Short-finned pilot whale (Pilot Whales are actually large dolphins), Striped dolphin, Bottlenose dolphin, Risso’s dolphin, Spotted dolphin, False killer whale (Again, a large dolphin) and Pacific white-sided dolphin.

In addition to these, more than 21,000 are killed all around Japan every year by harpoon and they include: Bair’d beaked whale, Dall’s porpoise dalli type, Dall’s porpoise truei type, Pacific white-sided dolphin, Rough-toothed dolphin, Killer Whale and Common dolphin.

I’m not sure why dolphins have to be considered important to humans to have value, but that said, dolphins have bigger brains than us. They have more convolutions in the gray matter for receptor neurons so they are more sensitive, they have an extra sense, sonar, and can see if a human heart is beating and/or if you’re pregnant. They are the only wild animals throughout history to routinely save the lives of humans. I think this fact alone makes them worthy of our respect and special enough to reach out, try to return the favor and save them.

It’s ironic to me that the only way we will be able to convince the Japanese government to stop killing them for food is to prove that dolphins are now too toxic to eat. This is thanks to all of the pollutants we are dumping into their environment. I’m just glad that dolphins don’t have the power to decide why humans should be important to them.

Right now, there’s a lot more attention given to the insensitivity of commercial whaling but very few people are aware of the intentional rounding up and slaughtering of dolphins, why do you think this is? 

Lack of awareness, and this will soon change, The Cove is coming to a theater near you.

Some readers have commented that there is little difference between the Japanese killing and consuming dolphins and Americans killing and consuming chicken, cattle and pig especially in the context of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Is one a lesser evil? 

You don’t terrorize the farm animals for days before you kill them, but they do this with the dolphins in the dolphin drives. In the movie we are quite lenient with the dolphin hunters. We only show the Disney version of the savagery they perpetrate in the safety of their lair in the cove. The violence we show is mercifully short and about 1 percent as graphic as what really happens back there. 

I went to a slaughterhouse for cattle in 1986 and I have not eaten things that walk since. That’s where I draw the line, with things that walk, and I’m learning to shop for things like shoes without leather. However, my feet are quite large and it’s difficult to find comfortable non-leather dress shoes. 

But in any case, we’re not going to win this argument on an inhumanity to animal issue—it will be won on an inhumanity to man issue. Dolphin meat is toxic beyond comprehension. It is extremely toxic. Roger Payne, founder of the Ocean Alliance said that dolphins are swimming in toxic dump sites. There are so many PCBs in the average bottlenose dolphin swimming on the coast of Megalopolis, the area between D.C. and Boston, that if one washed up on the shore it would have to be disposed of as toxic waste under superfund laws. The dolphin meat begin served in Japan has as much as 5000 times more mercury than allowed by Japanese laws. When we arrived in Japan, the Taiji mayor’s office had implemented a program where school children had to eat dolphin meat, it was compulsory, they couldn’t bring there own lunch and the children had to eat everything on their plate.

The Taiji Mayor and his cronies were about to launch a program to spread dolphin meat all over the school system and I’m proud to say that Ric O’Barry and the OPS team had a hand on getting that stopped. But there is still 1000 tons of dolphin meat being sold falsely as whale meat, used for pet food and the most toxic parts of the dolphins laced with the most mercury are being used as fertilizer for Japanese vegetables. I just found this out.

What do you think is necessary to wake up a culture whose diet is largely based on marine animals?

Only 1 percent of the Japanese people regularly eat whale meat--it’s very expensive to eat regularly. Whaling accounts for 0.0014 per cent of the national economy, or less than one-tenth the value of the country's annual market for toothbrushes. The only thing that sustains the ongoing whaling industry is huge government subsidies to business associates of politicians from the political party that has been in power since World War II (except for one 18-month stretch). That may be changing with the next election at the end of this month.

I often watch Whale Wars and think that it would be more effective for the Sea Shephard team to link up with Japanese animal rights groups that are similarly passionate about ending whale slaughter. Does this exist and could they help the dolphin cause? 

Camouflaged OPS members use the power of film to help fight dolphin killing.

My sense is that there is too large of chasm to reach across between Paul Watson who has a warrior’s heart and is in a constant battle to save the lives of all marine animals and the Japanese animal rights groups who are probably too passive to effect change as quick as Paul feels it needs to be done. I personally think that film is the world’s most powerful weapon of mass construction, the one last great hope we have to galvanize the forces of the best of humanity to create widespread and meaningful change. To me The Cove is not just a movie; it’s hopefully the beginning of a widespread movement to start the kind of change the next generation needs to carry on.

What needs to be done for the dolphin killings to ultimately stop? 

What the Japanese call, Gaiatsu, outside pressure causing inside pressure to change. It is the most effective way of changing a conformist culture.

And finally, what is one of the most effective ways for us to help the cause? 

Tell everyone to see the movie, the more popular this movie becomes the easier everyone’s work becomes. Tell your Japanese friends to see it, take them to dinner afterward and ask what they can do to get the word out in Japan. A journalist from Yahoo Japan was interviewing me last week and his hand was shaking while he held the microphone. I asked him if he was scared to report the film in his country, he told me, “I’m not scared for myself, I’m scared for my family.” MSN Japan ran a review of the movie last week and I’m told it was pulled down in less than 24 hours. We need more outside pressure. If you go to www.TakePart.com/TheCove and hit the 'take action' button that is the start of taking action.

Learn more about water issues with Planet Green's Blue August!

More on Dolphins:

Germophobes: Are You Unknowingly Poisoning Dolphins?

Swimming with Dolphins: Green or Not?

Stop Using Plastic Bags, Save Dolphins

Save the Ganges River Dolphins, Get Involved Today!