Holding pens for captured dolphins, Taiji, Japan. At any given moment, hundreds who’ve had their freedom stolen await their sale to marine parks around the world. Photo Credit: LIA/Dolphin Project
To a dolphin, captivity is a living hell. That they are somehow ‘luckier’ than those killed outright is debatable.
Every year, hundreds of dolphins are unfortunate enough to find themselves trapped behind the netting in Taiji, Japan’s infamous cove. What happens next is largely dependent on which species they happen to be. Marine parks and aquariums around the world have a strong preference for one species in particular, that being bottlenose dolphins. They comprise the majority of live-captures for an industry seeking to meet a seemingly insatiable demand.
For all other victims of these cruel drive-hunts, the most likely outcome is to be slaughtered and processed into food for human or animal consumption. Death is not quick, and it is not painless. Worst of all, it involves the trauma of being present as members of your pod, with whom you share intense social bonds, are killed. All while you await your turn to be dragged under the tarps where the killing takes place.
For these species – Stripped dolphins, Risso’s, Pacific white-sided, and several others – a small percentage would be captured and sold.
Historically speaking, another consequence of being a bottlenose was the chance of being released back out to sea, rather than being killed or taken captive. Presumably, this would be at a time when the hunters had plenty of dolphins in their ‘inventories’ to meet immediate demand, and better to give the pods a chance to regenerate so that numbers will be available to meet future demand.
What seems to have changed in the 2022-23 season just completed is that even the bottlenose began being killed rather than released. This year, a bottlenose had only a slightly better chance of being kept alive rather than killed. We don’t know the reason for this change.
One thing we do know is that the Taiji hunters have begun to keep much bigger inventories. It’s believed that they’ve decided to create a brand new aquatic theme park right there in Moriura Bay, where visitors could paddle board, swim with, and feed captive dolphins. Even to maximize profits by crossbreeding species to produce rare albino or hybrid species. Pretty sick stuff, but definitely with a financial incentive. So it doesn’t appear that at least some kind of market for captured dolphins will cease to exist anytime soon.
(As an aside, another thing we know is that the number of days in which Taiji’s drive-hunts produce nothing is increasing. We’d like to see the numbers killed or captured fall to zero as soon as possible. But it’s not a decrease in efficiency on the hunters’ part that’s driving this. Rather, it’s a decrease in the overall numbers of dolphins available to be hunted, which in itself is quite concerning. )
So that’s a bit of background. Now we ask you – after being trapped in the cove for several days, if you’ve been selected to be among those permitted to live, should you consider yourself lucky?
To try to relate, maybe insert yourself into a scenario which would have been all too familiar to many of our ancestors. Travelling with other members of your tribe, your small group is intercepted and detained. (This of course would be even worse if it were done by another species, whose technological capabilities were greater, and with whom communication was impossible. But for our purposes here, let’s just imagine your captors are other people). You’re taken to a holding area somewhere and await your fate for a few days. No food, water or other necessities are provided. Finally, someone shows up and performs some kind of evaluation of each of you in turn. You have no idea what they might be looking for.
To your shock and horror, many of your group are killed almost immediately, including your spouse and some of your children. This is done is full sight and hearing of the others, and death comes via a cruel and painful method. The victims’ cries will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Why you and perhaps one or two others of your family are spared is unknown to you, and you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering about the fate of those others you believe may still be alive. For yourself, you’ll soon realize that food deprivation will be used to compel certain specific but entirely unnatural behaviors. The purpose of these you have no way to understand. What you don’t know is that you’re being held for an indeterminate period of time, until a buyer shows up. Eventually, you’ll be constrained in a contraption you find bizarre and terrifying, then transported over a large distance, to a destination unknown to you.
Upon arrival, you’ll be dumped into a volume of space 1/200,000th of what you used to roam in. For a human, maybe think of it as being locked into an area the size of a bathroom, then the realization that you’ll never be permitted to leave. At this point, you finally begin to learn the purpose for which you’ve been kept alive. For the rest of your life you’ll be forced to perform circus tricks. Jumps, and dances, and sailing through hoops. For a being of your intelligence, learning to perform these on cue is easy, unchallenging, and tedious.
The food you’re given is not anything you’ve ever eaten when free, and the quantities are doled out sparingly and usually as a reward for ‘good behavior’. You’re in fact a slave whose purpose is to entertain, though it will likely never make sense to you why your captors would find such odd behaviors desirable. But should your responses to their cues ever suggest non-compliance, that food will be withheld. Other times, if your anger and frustration has come out as aggression towards your captors or the other captives, your food may be laced with drugs that will render you more docile.
For the highly social animal you are, whatever joy will be left to you will come in the form of the company of others locked into that situation with you. This despite the fact that they may be of other tribes with whom you don’t share a common language or dialect. Your tribe, and the protection and warmth it once offered, have been replaced with the company of strangers. At times their frustration and despair, as well as your own, will spill over into violence you now have no way to separate yourself from.
And yet this company is the only consolation on offer. If you’re less fortunate, complete isolation from others of your kind will be your fate, even for years at a time. Your captors seem to be completely indifferent to this. Over time you come to understand that help will not be arriving from any quarter…
This has been the reality for many human beings throughout history, and not so long ago at that. We can feel enormously fortunate that such an outcome is unlikely in the extreme for one of us now. But for dolphins, beings whose emotional and cognitive capacity rivals ours, this is the reality today.
Our cetacean brethren have a right to their lives, and to their liberty. We need to push out our moral frontier to include them. Anything less is an egregious moral failure on our part.
For The Orca’s Voice,
Your Canadian Cetacean Alliance Team
Leave a Reply