The Cove - From the Field
Louie Psihoyos is the executive director of the Oceanic Preservation Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to using photography and film to inspire change to help preserve the world’s oceans. He is also the director of the upcoming documentary The Cove, which probes the captive dolphin trade in Japan. Check out his personal account of the experiences he had while making the film below.
The Cove, opening this July in select theaters.
From the Field
By Louie Psihoyos
I just spent five years observing the captive dolphin trade for the feature documentary I directed called The Cove. My team and I covertly filmed a secret lagoon in Taiji, Japan where most captive dolphins come from.
Whaling started in Taiji around 400 years ago, but it’s only in the last few decades, since the moratorium on whaling in 1986 began, that Taiji began their massive industrial scale hunt of dolphins. The dolphin-capture process, which I have witnessed many times, is very violent. During the dolphin-hunting season (September through March), about a dozen boats cruise along the animals’ migratory routes and wait for the pods to swim by. When the dolphins pass, sometimes several hundred at a time, the hunters lower long poles into the water and bang on them, creating a wall of sound that frightens the dolphins and causes them to frantically swim away, unknowingly into a secret cove. To the dolphins, with their highly developed sonar, the banging of the poles must be comparable to humans being blasted by the noise of jet engines. The cove is then sealed with nets, and the dolphins are essentially put up for sale.
The Japanese government and the dolphin hunters do not want this activity filmed. There are “Keep Out” signs all along the coast surrounding the cove. The dolphin hunters are aggressive and have become violent. The Taiji cove is a natural fortress protected on three sides by steep cliffs. There is a series of tunnels to get through that are guarded by sensors and a guard dog, as well as spiked fences with barbed wire and warning signs. The police put 24-hour surveillance on my team on the six trips I made to Taiji. To evade them, I assembled a kind of Ocean’s Eleven team to penetrate the cove with hidden cameras.
The mold-makers at George Lucas’ ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), now called Kerner Optical, were shown photographs of the site. They then crafted fake rocks designed to hide our high definition cameras and microphones. World-champion freediver Mandy Rae Cruickshank and Kirk Krack dove into the bay at night to hide underwater cameras and hydrophones. We also hid remote controlled cameras in fake bird’s nests and built an unmanned drone with gyro-stabilized high definition cameras below it — we even had a blimp painted like a dolphin with a remote controlled high definition camera mounted below. We used military-grade thermal cameras to detect the night movement of guards and police, and constructed a series of blinds in the surrounding cliffs, where camouflage and face paint became standard issue for the OPS team. The making of The Cove was more like a military black ops mission than a documentary, and the footage we came back with is astounding — on the film festival circuit it is playing to standing ovations all over the country. Needless to say, the Japanese government isn’t so happy about our success penetrating the cove — our sources there tell us it’s best if we don’t return.
In Japan, the fisheries officials we interviewed claim that dolphins and whales are responsible for eating too many fish in the ocean and that they are pests. The former delegate of Japan’s International Whaling Commission (IWC) said, “Whales are the cockroaches of the oceans.” I’ve been to several IWC meetings where the Japanese delegation argued that the decline in fisheries is related to the increase of cetaceans. This ignores the fact that most whales eat krill or plankton. Unfortunately, the real culprit of overfishing is humans. Whales and dolphins have thrived for millions of years before we drove many of them to near extinction. The fisheries decline has happened only in the last few generations since we’ve learned to harvest fish on an unprecedented scale. One leader of an NGO told me that “blaming whales and dolphins for eating too many fish is like blaming woodpeckers for deforestation.”
To rationalize eating whales and dolphins as a form of pest control is, of course, absurd. But even more shocking is that dolphin meat that the Japanese people consume has been found to be toxic. Not just a little toxic. Dolphin meat contains many more times the level of mercury that is recommended by the Japanese Ministry of Health (whose recommendations are far more stringent than the U.S.) But if you go to Japan’s Ministry of Health’s website, they actually recommend dolphin meat be consumed by pregnant women. Roger Payne, the scientists who is co-credited with the discovery that humpback whales sing, has been conducting a five-year survey of the toxicity of cetaceans. He told me that the average dolphin off the coast of the U.S. has so many toxins that technically it would be eligible for a superfund cleanup. Payne refers to dolphins as “swimming toxic dump sites.”
The developing brain of small children is most susceptible to the debilitating effects of mercury, which can cause learning problems and kill sensory neurons connected to sight, hearing and touch. At the most extreme levels, mercury poisoning looks like mental retardation or cerebral palsy. That’s why we were shocked when we learned that the dolphin meat was being given away to children as part of their school lunch programs. The mayor of the city was also developing a program to have dolphin and whale meat served all over the country.
Scott Baker, perhaps the world’s leading authority on cetacean DNA, set up a portable DNA lab in downtown Tokyo on one of our trips. He tested hundreds of samples of what was being sold as “whale” meat from around Japan and found that much of it was actually dolphin meat. In other words, much of the meat consumers were eating was actually mislabeled toxic dolphin meat. I’m proud to report that because of the work of dolphin advocate, Ric O’Barry and my organization OPS, two Taiji city commissioners did their own mercury tests on the dolphin meat and it is no longer served in the school system. However dolphin meat continues to be sold all over the country.
The real lesson that dolphins can teach us is that we are destroying the oceans and making these beautiful animals toxic by all the things that we are dumping into the environment. To educate yourself further and take action against the Taiji dolphin slaughter, please go to www.thecovemovie.com or Ric’s site, www.savejapandolphins.org.
Want to help?
Go to www.thecovemovie.com and click on “What can I do?” to write the Japanese embassy and let them know what you think about the situation. Remind them that you vote with how you spend your dollars. You can also visit the Oceanic Preservation Society Site (www.opsociety.org) for other ways to get involved.
