So I read this article today about the film The Cove won the Oscar for best documentary yesterday. The documentary is about the dolphin hunt. Yeah not about fishing that accidentally nets a few dolphins but a hunt specifically for dolphins. The article highlighted a response from the Mayor of Taiji, where the slaughter takes place, clipped as follows with my own emphasis added in bold large font.



It's really unfortunate that people in the 21st century can hide behind the guise of 'tradition' to justify what they do. Other 'traditions' that come to mind include female genital mutilation and Sharia law, eating tiger penis, primogeniture, feet binding, slavery and eating the brains of the deceased, among many others. All were traditions of one kind or another. Doesn't make it OK just because it's tradition. Their claim of cultural tradition is particularly dubious due to how long it's been in practice. At least the other bullshit had centuries. But decades of dolphin killing? Hell, that just means that someone got hungry after WW2 and decided to see what else was edible. What if someone started hunting the fishermen that hunted dolphins? If they culled fishermen after every dolphin culling and did it every year for a couple years, that would turn murder into a "tradition" as well wouldn't it? This is why the logic behind using "tradition" as a green light for any abhorrent behavior is ridiculous.

You could ask the question of why can I classify dolphin killing as more abhorrent than something like a cow for food? Because they are highly intelligent and have a record of helping drowning humans in the past. So until a cow drags someone from a burning building, dolphins have a special seat of honor in my book.

Bender: Who wants Dolphin?
[The crew gasps.]
Leela: Dolphin? But they're intelligent!
Bender: Not this one. He blew all his money on lottery tickets!

Okay totally not saying that I want to do any of those things. But right and wrong is sort of in the eye of the beholder. Just because you have never tried brains and the idea seems disgusting and apalling to you does not mean it is wrong to eat them. The person is dead, what the hell do they care? Some people eat ham for Christmas. That doesn't sound wrong does it... unless your Jewish.

Filthy unkosher animals! Ew dirty pigs! Nah actually I just don't like ham because of the gristle, I bite into that and it is all over. *shudder* Bacon is good though. I'm a bad Jew. Mmm bacon. MMmm bacon cheeseburger. Mmm bacon and guacamole cheeseburger! And fries, ooh fries! *drool* Damn diet. I'm hungry What was I saying? Ah well guess it wasn't that important.

Oh yea tradition, some of those things you describe are despicable to us, but to the people that do it is just a fact of life. Trying to change it would be like trying to extract the US economy out from under the Federal Bank, or the IRS. Damn near impossible and people are going to get killed trying. And like abolishing slavery the people it affects are going to have to be willing to risk everything to change it. Not that in the case of the dolphins they have the power to do anything.... but that wasn't quite the point. I just had to say something because atleast one of the traditions you cited as being wrong, while I wouldn't do it personally doesn't sound wrong to me, just disgusting. I think eating raw fish is disgusting, but I wouldn't say it is wrong to do it.

And I think Hindu's would probably prefer you kill the dolphin over the cow.

and um Save the Dolphins!

"But we've always done it this way." or "You're new here, this is how it's done."

I hear this at work a lot. We have a lot of very experienced employees that are set in their traditions, it's just easier to keep doing it the way we've been doing it then changing.

10 years ago our factory had a lot of incidents / injuries (I work at a steel mill, industrial plant). Our head honcho of operations, back then, decided he was going to put a stop to the lack of safety. It was really bad how many people were getting hurt and for really dumb reasons. However, in order to do that, he was going to have to change the culture, because everyone had the idea that "we've always done it this way".

He told us last year when we had only one injury (compared the the 50 or so we were getting a year) that it's taken 10 years to change the culture. And that's about something that should be a no-brainer to everyone.

This dolphin topic is controversial, not everyone agrees, even offhandedly, that it should be stopped (meaning the people shouting tradition pretty much would rather just keep doing things how they've been doing it for their own reasons).

When it comes to those kinds of things, I think Ghandi's line is most appropriate - Be the change you want to see in the world. By this you lead by example, try and change the culture one person at a time just by your mere attitude / action. It trickles down like a ripple. If you start to research where your food comes from and you swear off whale / dolphin for good, you might influence one of your friends or family members. If they like the idea, they might influence someone they know.

Yeah, it's idealistic; but it's the philosophy I live by being a vegetarian.

True there are many many traditions and some are stupid and some are sensible. The ones I brought up were specifically because of the harm they did to society in one way or another. The act of eating is not bad: the act of eating for a stupid reason is. Eating tiger penis is an aphrodisiac in China and they killed almost ALL the tigers because of it. The harm to nature is that the top predator is removed from the ecosystem and the harm to society is that its a hoax and a waste of money. Eating brains... there is a primitive aboriginal tribe that ate the brains to take in the essence of their beloved dead. The harm was that they ended up contracting a fatal neurological virus that is like mad cow disease that is only spread by eating brains. Ok, they weren't turned into zombies, but neurological deterioration is a pretty bad way to go. I believe there was a news story that also related how mad cow dis. is spread when the animal farms mix in ground up brains into the animal feed. The animals basically cannibalize ...(or recycle, depending on how you see it) their dead relatives before they in turn are killed and subsequently fed back to their offspring. Somewhere in there is a bad neuro bug from brains.

Anyway those eating examples were there for a reason but I guess those were not nearly as obvious as FGM or slavery. The other argument that the Cove directors are pushing is the high levels of mercury in dolphin meat. Dolphins are top predators as are whales and sharks. Top animals always serve to concentrate pollutants into their bodies as they eat other fish. They live for many many years, unlike the prey they hunt, and over time they are exposed to more toxins. Culling so many dolphins at a time means a rapid and unsustainable drop in the top predator ranks. Larger animals always take longer time and more energy to breed so regular slaughter means taking the dolphin out of the ecosystem which carries a high risk of fucking up said ecosystem. The example of wolves being hunted to extinction in north america meant that there were unlimited deer to run around the forests. They ATE all the new trees and never gave them a chance to grow and the forests became old and filled with dead wood creating a tinder box. The result of lost homes finally got people's attention. The eco system will always achieve its own equilibrium and nature will get a bit violent to do it. In the case of the ocean, we don't know what effects it will have. It's not just about preserving nature because dolphins are the shiz... it's about creating a sustainable ecosystem.

The Japanese aren't known for their conservationism. They exploit everything, especially in the ocean that they somehow feel is their right to destroy with the assumption that it will always be there.

Our government and a couple others are making a push to ban the international trade of Blue Fin Tuna. Japan is threatening to cash in like a zillion dollars in our bonds as leverage against us.

The problem is that the international trade of BFT to Japan is decimating the stock of what used to be one of the most abundant fish in the ocean. Science shows that a complete closure for 5 years wouldn't even come close to helping the stocks rebuild. A 50% reduction in the Quota would and Japan is like "What's a quota?".

It's really sad. Then again on the flip side our country wants to ban all recreational fishing from every lake, stream, pond, and coastal water area. So there are extremes. In terms of eating dolphin I don't care if it doesn't destroy the population, but you can't trust Japan. Also I struggle with that "this is how it's always been done" concept every single day. My father is very old school stuck in his ways, and everytime I change how something is done at our shop, usually to make it a more modern streamlined function, I get fought with until either I give up or he realizes I'm right.

Heh one episode of Bizarre Foods I watched they went to a penis restaurant in China. I'd hate to be the butcher for that place.

A lot of societies that eat brains or testicles or any other "weird" parts of animals usually did so because they were typically poor and didn't want to waste any part of the animal. I can certainly see this being true for farm critters raised specifically for food in a small/poor community or a tribal society that has to hunt wild game in order to survive. But just cause it makes you perform better in the sack? Get lost. Respect your food and where it came from.

Here it is....KURU

The neurological disease that makes you tremble and makes you laugh uncontrollably. Saw this on discovery channel.

/edit dammit! fixed link

this pic was going to go into the gaming forum but...



From Kotaku's photoshop contest.

The great thing about dividing your nation into states, each with their own local governments, is that each small community can have their own set of laws and customs that suit their local culture. As long as a state isn't doing something that's going to affect the country as a whole, they can eat as many penises as they like. The same type of standard applies here too. Sure we may not think its right, but its their country and their water, if they want to fuck up their isolated part of the world, more power to them, as long as it doesn't affect me.

Besides, I tend to take the George Carlin, "why are we here? plastics!" approach to the environment anyways. It's just arrogant meddling to think that a few dolphins are going to have a huge impact on a planet that's been through earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, magnetic reversal of the poles, etc. Sure, in the short term, killing off some wolves may have a negative affect, but the planet is a self correcting system. It's not going anywhere, we are!

I love dolphins and stuff but today I'm in a cynical mood and my first thought when I re-read this thread was, "If the dolphins are REALLY that smart, they'd realize the area near the Japanese coast is DANGEROUS and LEAVE for less hostile waters, because let's face it, only the retarded would stay in an area where they notice their friends are getting picked off one by one. Sooo maybe they deserve to get digested because the truly smart ones moved out years ago and left the darwin award winning pods behind."

The wolf example actually cost the state multi millions in wildfire damage. The state ended up reintroducing wolves to kill some of the deer. The alternative would be to set Ted Nugent loose in the forest hehe.

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with this if the dolphins were not mammals that only have 1 offspring per year. Killing several thousand each time means a severe drop in population viability. If they farmed dolphins, like we do cows, then I wouldn't care (meaning they had a sustainable farming system in place that produced enough new offspring to replace the ones culled). As I pointed out earlier, dolphins are mammals and don't shoot thousands of eggs out the ass like fish do. We regularly throw catches too small back into the water to give them a chance to grow. These guys just kill em all. And would it kill them (heh) to just electrify the water to kill em all quickly? Or use explosives so that the concussive shockwaves can do the job? Why use spears to jab each animal 30 times like they were reenacting Psycho? At least the cow/pig/chicken slaughter house ISN'T AS CRUEL (lol).