(MWN / 17-09-09) One more year, the people of a fishing village throw themselves into their traditional slaughter of bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales. It is a blood bath in which the animals are killed slowly with long knives and spears, amidst a red sea.

The meat of each animal is paid at 375 €, although some of them are paid at 675 €. This is the reason why these brutal killings continue and have increase in Japan despite the international condemnation.

In the first hunt of the season, which began Sept. 1, at least 100 bottlenose dolphins and 50 pilot whales have been slaughtered, and over the next six months the fishermen of the city will be responsible for fishing nearly 2,300 dolphins of the annual Japanese quota of 20,000 specimens.

In traditional fisheries, fishermen chase dolphin groups in the open sea while bang metal poles under the water to confuse their hypersensitive sonar. The animals, shattered, are led into a cove surrounded by large nets to avoid them escaping and kill them the next morning with knives and spears. Once dead, they load them onto ships and carried them to the dock to cut them into pieces in a warehouse, where the fishermen work is hidden behind the curtains.

The international condemnation has done little for these slaughters to be carried out in relative secrecy since 2003, when two members of the environmental group Sea Shepherd released several dolphins that were enclosed in a surrounded cove and prepared to be killed.

FOREIGNERS: POTENTIAL SABOTEUR

According to Justin McCurry, reporter of the British newspaper The Guardian, was accompanied at all time during his visit to Taiji, he was forbidden to take pictures, and he was questioned by the police, who sees any foreigner as a possible saboteur. Villagers did not want to speak to him unless their names were never published.

Taiji, a town of 3,500 inhabitants on the Pacific coast, is considered the spiritual home of Japanese whaling industry. The city, six hours far from Tokyo by train, is dotted with restaurants serving whale sashimi, and dolphin and whale iconography appears on everything from sidewalk to road tunnels and even a wind turbine. In fact, there is a Whale Museum, where they say that this fishery started around 1600.

Local fishermen say that dolphins and other small cetaceans are not covered by the moratorium on hunting whales. They think that what critics see as a senseless slaughter of intelligent creatures is as a legitimate exercise of pest control: they blame the dolphins for decimating fish stocks and defend their culinary traditions.

“People say that dolphins are friendly and intelligent, but some regions have a tradition of eating dolphin meat,” said Uoya Oda, an official of the fisheries. “The killing of dolphins can be negative for our image, but we can not issue an order to stop it,” he added.