The Cove: Understanding Japan’s Dolphin Drive Fishery and the Myths Surrounding It

Photograph of mother and baby dolphin courtesy of Dolphin Quest

The Cove: Understanding Japan’s Dolphin Drive Fishery and the Myths Surrounding It

The Cove is a 2009 award-winning documentary that exposes the annual drive fishery hunt of dolphins and whales in the whaling village of Taiji, Wakayama, Japan.

Drive fisheries are not historically new. Several countries aside from Japan have used, or still use, this method to hunt animals, including the Solomon Islands, the Faroe Islands and Peru. The drive fishery at Taiji is believed to have existed for more than 350 years. However, The Cove was not the first to document this controversial hunt—publications such as National Geographic and television series by the late Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the mid-1970s also highlighted it. Many people have rightly raised concerns about these hunting methods, questioning them on moral, ethical and animal-welfare grounds.

Live captures and the film’s emphasis

One aspect of the film that has proved particularly controversial is the claim that, in recent years, a proportion of animals from this fishery have not been killed but were instead selected for live display in public aquariums and marine parks. In 2007—the year The Cove was released—official figures show that 13,170 dolphins and whales were hunted and killed in Japan. Of that number, 1,239 were taken by the drive-fishery method, with 90 (7.3%) removed alive for aquariums.

 

Between 2000 and 2013, a total of 19,092 small cetaceans were taken in the drive fishery at Taiji. Of these, 17,686 were slaughtered, while 1,406 were captured alive and sold to zoos and aquariums (graph and data courtesy of Cetbase).

Unfortunately, the filmmakers suggested that supplying animals to aquariums and marine parks was the primary purpose of the hunt and that, if this practice ceased, so would the hunt itself. This emphasis is unsurprising given that one of the film’s principal figures is animal-rights activist Ric O’Barry, who is strongly opposed to dolphins being kept in zoological parks.