January 3, 2010: The Cove
The Cove is a documentary which has received a fair bit of attention, about the annual dolphin slaughter in Japan which continues despite worldwide disapproval. Activists try to bring the horrors to light, and it is kept in the dark by fishermen on a small scale and governments on a large scale.
In the small town of Taiji, Japan, dolphins are herded into a small cove day-to-day for several months of the year. Animal trainers from SeaWorld-type resorts worldwide take their pick of dolphins to buy and keep in captivity to train for tourist shows. The rest are slaughtered for meat, and this is done to the tune of 23,000 dolphins each year. There are a few problems with this. First, the practice is not sustainable because each and every dolphin which can be killed is killed, as there is no quota. Second, the dolphin meat is not suitable for consumption due to the high mercury content since dolphins are quite high up in the food chain, so to sell the meat throughout Japan requires mislabelling it as other meat, resulting in mercury poisoning of consumers. So how can this continue, when the International Whaling Commission meets regularly and controls the killing of cetaceans? Well, as it turns out, dolphins are among the smaller cetaceans and apparently not worth the commission wasting their time with, besides which, Japan pays off smaller nations in order to gain official support at the Commission for their practices.
The emotional core of this story is found in Ric O’Barry. He leads the charge to expose what is going on in the cove, coordinating an effort to sneak hidden cameras and microphones into the heavily guarded area where the dolphins are slaughtered. It turns out that he was a part of the original US TV series Flipper back in the mid-1960s, and he was the one who originally caught the dolphins who played Flipper. At the time, there was no particular concern for the animals, and he was making good money and living a good life, but as captive dolphin parks became more popular around the world, he became less comfortable with what they were doing and he had a crisis of conscience in the 1970s. As he points out, he spent 10 years making this happen, and has now spent 35 years trying to make it stop. His experience as a dolphin trainer on the TV show taught him that the animals were very intelligent and would get depressed in captivity.
The triumphant ending of the film has O’Barry crashing a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, displaying the footage he finally captured with his hidden cameras. It’s heartbreaking stuff, and hopefully that activism and this film will bring this to light and bring about change.
The Cove didn’t strike me as being quite as brilliant as I’d heard it is. It was a bit disjointed and the pacing was confusing, with long stretches focused on less relevant details and only a very short time devoted to the footage and its presentation at the end. I found myself thinking that it’s only 10 minutes until the credits roll, and we still don’t know whether he even gets his footage, much less whether he actually lets us see any of it. I suppose this was a conscious decision to emphasize the journey towards getting the evidence rather than bludgeoning us with much of the evidence itself. By devoting the majority of the voice to the activists, it was also a very one-sided film. Again, that’s the filmmakers’ right, but it comes across as unbalanced. Admittedly, they give Japanese officials many chances to explain their side and there are plenty of videos of interviews which end with silence or refusals to answer questions, so there’s not much more they can do, but it leads to a demonization of Japan and its motives, going so far as to conclude that Japan is more or less doing this just to piss off the west.
Still, this is good information and publicity to have out there, if only to bring to light the mercury poisoning of Japanese citizens without their knowledge, and changes have already been made based on that information. The Cove is an accessible documentary, just maybe a bit too one-sided to illustrate a balanced point.
A popular documentary about controversial behaviour.
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