Thursday 10 September 2009

Japanese fishing village goes ahead with dolphin hunt

A Japanese coastal town has gone ahead with its controversial dolphin hunt, shrugging off protests from animal-rights activists, local officials said Thursday.

Fishermen in Taiji town caught about 100 bottlenose dolphins and 50 pilot whales on Wednesday, in their first catch since the fishery season started on September 1, Wakayama prefectural official Yasushi Shimamura said.

They plan to sell about 50 dolphins to aquariums nationwide and release the remainder back into the sea, while the whale meat will be sold for human consumption, an official at a local fishermen's cooperative said.

The Japanese town's annual dolphin hunt drew international attention earlier this year after the release of award-winning eco-documentary 'The Cove', in which a team of film-makers covertly covered the event in graphic detail.

After the film's release, the Australian coastal city of Broome ended its sister-city relationship with Taiji to protest the hunt.

Town officials said they would not slaughter any of the dolphins caught on Wednesday, but denied it was due to international pressure.

"We didn't release the rest of the dolphins because there have been protests against dolphin hunting from animal rights activists," said a fisheries cooperative official, who declined to give his name. "From the viewpoint of resource control, we've been occasionally releasing them on our own judgement in the past."

Hunting dolphins and small whales is not prohibited by the International Whaling Commission's ban on commercial whaling, but Japan's Fisheries Agency restricts the practice by handing out annual quotas to several fishing towns.

This year, Taiji was allocated a quota of about 2,300 small cetaceans including dolphins, prefectural official Shimamura said. Cetaceans are largely- hairless aquatic mammals, such as dolphins, whales and porpoises.

The southwestern Japanese town has strongly defended its tradition of hunting whales and dolphins.

"People in Taiji, as well as Wakayama prefecture ... hope that animal rights activists understand the cultural difference between them and us," Shimamura said.

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