The Horrors Exposed in The Cove Apply to Us All

Last year when I first watched the Oscar-award winning documentary, The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos, I walked out of the screening silently, and with a heavy heart over the film that chronicles an annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan. For anyone who appreciates animals or seeks to protect them instead of willingly cause them harm or pain, parts of this movie are hard to watch, but thankfully, those images do not overtake the larger message of the film. 

The Cove isn’t simply an environmental or emotionally-driven movie to save a species, but communicates a complex story through an Ocean’s Eleven-style mission to uncover the horrors happening in Taiji, a harbor town at the tip of the Kii peninsula south of Kyoto. The film opens with reports that for years the people of Taiji have been rounding up thousands of dolphins and porpoises cattle-drive style, senselessly slaughtering roughly 23,000 of these creatures annually and selling others to international aquariums, at a hefty markup.  

The film and even the presence of the team being in Taiji are not sanctioned by the Japanese government and in fact most members of the crew are stalked and harassed by the government or their henchmen throughout the mission. Despite the numerous hurdles and covert operations (some involving night vision and video cameras made to look like rocks) the team must endure, they ultimately get the unfortunate and sordid footage of the slaughter and expose these never before seen images to the world.

While The Cove is known in part for the grisly footage they were able to capture, the film also addresses related human health issues from consuming whale and dolphin meat. The Cove exposed the fact that local school children were being fed the toxic dolphin meat found to be extremely and at times lethally high in mercury, cadmium and the U.S.-banned pesticide DDT. In June 2008, AERA, a Japanese weekly journal, reported that the whale and dolphin meat sold in Taiji contained a level of mercury 160 times higher than normal, and that the hair of a local sample of eight men and women had 40 times higher mercury levels. (Extreme mercury poisoning can cause patients to complain of a loss of sensation and numbness in their hands and feet, losing all feeling in their body, difficulty seeing, hearing and swallowing, eventually leading to severe convulsions, coma and eventually death.)

Ultimately, The Cove also speaks to a larger Japanese whaling issue the international community is continually at odds with. Recently in June, the International Whaling Commission was poised to reverse a 25-year whaling moratorium in the vain hope the international community could get Japan to agree to kill fewer whales each year. See my colleague Taryn Kiekow’s blog about that here.

The question I came away with after viewing The Cove is why the practice of killing 23,000 dolphins and porpoises must continue every year in Taiji. Who benefits from a practice that produces meat that poisons people, and that results in a fraction of the dolphins captured sold to aquatic theme parks for a life of captivity? Japan’s argument is that whaling is part of their culture and way of life, though the majority of Japanese people do not eat whale or dolphin meat. Most people in Japan don’t even know the dolphin slaughter is happening.

The Cove has screened internationally and also in Japan, and there are attempts underway to expand the film’s presence and raise awareness within the Japanese culture to shut down this practice. The film has received international acclaim (it received 24 international film awards after its release in August 2009) and numerous calls to end the annual slaughter.

Many audiences probably saw The Cove through special film screenings last year, but if you missed it, Discovery's Plant Green channel is showing this powerful film as part of their “Blue August” month. Despite its difficult subject matter, I highly recommend watching this film. The images of the dolphins will stay with you, but hopefully so will a sense of hope that the more people who see this and become outraged over the practice, the sooner the slaughter will end.

Premiering later this month on Discovery’s Planet Green channel, you will have a chance to view this powerful film. To make your voice known, visit http://www.savejapandolphins.org/ or http://www.thecovemovie.com/. The Cove, premiers August 30 at 9/8c and again in the Reel Impact Documentary Series September 4 at 10/9c

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