WDCS applauds the Academy for recognizing this important film and is hopeful that the continuing international exposure will raise the profile of the dolphin drive hunts in Japan and see an end to these horrible hunts. The Oscars reward the previous year’s greatest cinema achievements as determined by some of the world’s most accomplished motion picture artists and professionals, and represent the highest honors in filmmaking. http://www.oscars.com
The Cove, which opened in August 2009 across the United States, profiles the dramatic efforts of a small group of activists to document and expose the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins in the Japanese drive hunts. This documentary exposes these hunts in a dramatic action film that has continued to receive accolades and commendations from film festivals across the globe over the past year since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, USA last January.
The drive hunts in Japan are a devastatingly cruel practice that involves the corralling of dolphins at sea and driving them into the confines of small coves in Taiji and Futo, Japan. Here, they are slaughtered for meat or kept alive for sale to marine parks and aquaria across the globe. This is not a subsistence kill but a small industry regulated by the Japanese government. Yearly quotas for both villages are in the thousands, where small cetaceans of several species including bottlenose dolphins, striped dolphins, spotted dolphins, false killer whales and short-finned pilot whales, are taken. No drive hunts have taken place in Futo since 2004 and the focus is on Taiji, where the hunts occur each season from September through April.
WDCS continues to work for an end to these brutal drive hunts. We have been active in confronting the drive hunts in Japan on a number of levels, from raising awareness of the hunts, taking part in peaceful protests and visiting Japan to document them. We have worked with the marine mammal scientific community to garner a public statement against these hunts, and helped secure a US congressional resolution condemning the practice. WDCS has also worked to secure the acknowledgement of the dolphinarium industry of its complicity in fuelling the dolphin drive hunts through the demand generated by marine parks and aquaria that either directly, or indirectly, source live dolphins from these hunts. And within Japan, we have developed an educational campaign with our Japanese colleagues to educate the public about whales, dolphins and their suffering in drive and other hunts. Our report, Driven by Demand exposes the involvement of the international aquarium industry in the hunts, a story also told in our short film of the same name: http://www.wdcs.org/submissions_bin/drivenbydemand.pdf