“The Cove” is a great documentary, and it deserves all of the awards that it has won. It, however, is a bit extreme in its overall criticism of Japanese fisherman. Eating whale meat is not my thing. I have tried it, and, to me, its taste is equivalent to that of a pencil eraser. It may be culturally acceptable in Japan, and we have an intercultural obligation to respect the consumption of whale meat. Japan, owning the largest seafood market in the world and using the ocean’s offerings as the main source of protein for its citizenry, needs to respect the ecology of the ocean and not over fish. I can see where an individual from Japan would consider a dish of muskrat or deer meat as being offensive, so why is whale meat any less acceptable? One has to ask, does killing dolphins in Taiji negatively impact the world, and can the world’s oceans sustain Japan’s love of porpoise meat? It is clear that the International Whaling Commission has taken a concern with larger whale species, but it has plainly ignored dolphins. Are they more abundant? Viewers of “The Cove” must realize that killing animals for meat is a dirty business. One huge difference between fishing the world’s oceans and killing cattle is that one is domesticated and produced for slaughter. The dolphins and other whales being killed for Japanese consumers are not domesticated, and they are bred but completely naturally occurring. Thus, it is difficult for the world’s scientific community to gauge the effects that overfishing could have on species within our oceans, and the potentiality for the Japanese or other nations to overfish oceanic species, whether it be or one of the other 230,000, is ever present. Could the Japanese use technology to harvest wanted oceanic food, similarly to Brazil’s cattle industry, to make whaling a non-issue in the modern world?
