Day 5: The Cove

It's Friday! Whoop! Time for a film...

My partner (Gareth - I should probably start referring to him by name seeing as he's also playing a key role in all of this) told me about the film The Cove years ago when we first met. He's a seasoned scuba diver so he's seen the destruction of the oceans first hand and educated himself on the issues, as such he won't eat any fish ever. So tonight seemed a great time to sit and watch The Cove.

As with Earthlings, I'd put the film in the horror category. If you haven't watched it before, the full film is available on YouTube . It's hard to know how to explain how I felt watching the film. to give you the basic premise, it centres around dolphin and whale killing practices in Japan, specifically in the Taiji cove which drives migrating dolphins into nets so they can be picked for marine park amusements, or killed for food. There's many ironies in the story, such as the demand for dolphin meat being almost non-existent in Japan despite them killing almost 23,000 dolphins a year. And the other more sinister irony that the dolphin meat that they're passing off as whale is so high in Mercury that it's slowly killing the fishermen, government officials and their children, those who are trying so hard to keep this declining industry alive. They'll do anything to keep whaling, some laughable actions such as trying to convince a room full of scientists that Dolphins were essentially a pest, shown with a clip art PowerPoint presentation. Other tactics are more sinister, such as bribing small developing island countries to join their plight, in exchange for economy boosting cash we would presume.

I'm not really doing the film justice here, you have to watch it for yourself. The people who made the film are modern day heroes, putting their lives and careers on the line to expose the story. It's the least I can do to click on their petitions, follow their Twitter accounts and share their actions. It's so late that I'll come back to this topic and see how else I can support them.