The
Cove is the movie I saved you from for more than thirty years.
Back,
about 1978, I got wind that a small village on the Sea of Japan, hunted
and killed dolphins, about 600 a year. The village I went to was one of
several that hunted dolphin for meat, sold in local markets.
I
had already defanged the rabid anti-Japanese anti-whaling movement, so I
quickly acted to head off another anti-Japanese
enviro-fanatics-disaster.
I met the local fishermen,
talked to their leaders at the fishing cooperative and got invited to
the local community banquet. I took photos, and wrote an article for the
leading environmental newspaper of the day, the Friends of the Earth
weekly. I got a full page center spread and made the point that the
fishermen were part of a small town traditional coop with a practice
that went back centuries. I had a photo of the ancient shrine where the
fisherman made offerings on behalf of the dead dolphins.
My
article was sympathetic, played on all the warm and fuzzy feelings that
enviro-activists had for traditional people and staved off the kind of
hate-filled nonsense that was made into the current documentary, thirty
years latter.