Scientists unite to fight Japan's dolphin hunt

A coalition of marine scientists has launched a campaign to halt Japan's annual "dolphin drive," in which thousands of bottlenose dolphins are herded into shallow coves to be slaughtered with knives and clubs.

The government-sanctioned event, which extends through the fall and winter, has been under fire for years from environmental and animal-rights activists.

But in a potentially influential escalation of that battle, mainstream scientists and administrators of zoos and aquariums have united to condemn the practice.

The campaign pits the emerging science of animal intelligence against a centuries-old human cultural tradition.

In an online statement released Monday, the protest organizers — including many of the world's leading dolphin scientists and the man who trained the television star Flipper — say the hunt is a ritual massacre of creatures that, according to a growing body of research, are not just intelligent but sophisticatedly self-aware.

The statement calls on the Japanese government to stop issuing permits allowing the hunt and for a halt to the purchase of dolphins caught in the drive. It also aims to get 1 million people to sign an online petition (www.actfordolphins.org) to the government.

"We contend that the Japanese drive hunt of dolphins and small cetaceans is a brutal and inhumane practice that violates all standards for animal welfare," said Diana Reiss, director of the marine mammal research program at the New York Aquarium's Osborn Laboratories of Marine Science.

With co-worker Lori Marino of Emory University, Reiss showed five years ago that dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, an aspect of cognitive complexity that had previously been documented only in humans and chimpanzees.

Takumi Fukuda, the fisheries' attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, defended the hunt as a centuries-old national tradition.

"It is kind of our cultural activity," he said. "We think it is important."

Fukuda said the government has already limited the practice to economic-development zones, where fishermen are struggling to get by. And he said the government issues permits for only the number of animals that can safely be culled without threatening the species' survival.

This year 21,000 dolphins can be killed, Fukuda said, and 15,000 or 16,000 of those have already been killed.

Although little discussed within Japan, the dolphin drive has gained international notoriety, especially as opponents have secretly filmed the event. Fishermen use nets and noise to herd dolphins, pilot whales and other marine mammals into shallow waters, then kill the animals, usually with knives.

The new move to use public pressure caps two years of talks between a committee of marine mammal experts and Japanese government officials. The scientists presented peer-reviewed scientific information about dolphin brain anatomy, intelligence, social behavior, ecology and physiology — all of which ultimately proved futile, said Reiss, who was involved in the negotiations.

Hal Whitehead, who studies whale and dolphin social systems at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said dolphins are among the few animals known to live in multicultural communities, in which groups of individuals that have been taught to do things — such as catch prey — in different ways live together.

Because dolphins learn from one another, he said, major cullings can have a serious impact on surviving individuals' ability to persevere. "When you remove a bunch of animals, you remove not only them but the knowledge that they have."