The Cove Page #5

were cordoned off by themselves

away from their parents

while their parents

were all being slaughtered.

And so I wanted to get

a better look into the lagoon,

and as Joe and I tried

to walk down this path,

some of the fishermen came

and actually butted chest against us.

Don't touch the girl.

Trying to stop us

from getting that vantage

point on the killing.

And just after that,

We walked down

to the water's edge,

and this one poor dolphin, it...

You could see it

trying to get away,

and it was swimming

straight for us and the shore,

and it actually made it

over a couple of the nets,

and every time

it came up for a breath,

you could see all this blood

coming out behind it,

and you could see

the last couple of breaths it took,

and then it went down,

and we never saw it again.

Bye-bye-bye-bye.

It's a relatively small group of people

who are doing this.

Outside these few remote villages,

most of the population

doesn't even know this is going on.

The fishermen here who do this

tell you "This is our tradition.

"This is our culture.

"You don't understand us.

You eat cows.

Well, we eat dolphins."

Well, the truth is that's the big lie.

How can it be their culture, their tradition,

if the Japanese people

don't even know about it?

are killed for meat every year.

You never heard of it?

People in Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo...

the reason they don't know about it

is because of a media cover-up,

a systematic, deliberate cover-up,

a media blackout,

because the dolphin meat

is heavily laced with mercury.

Mercury starts in the environment

with the smallest of organisms,

and every step of the ladder up,

it gets magnified about ten times...

until the top of the food chain,

where you get these

incredibly toxic levels.

All the fish that we love most to eat...

things like striped bass, bluefish,

tuna, swordfish, marlin...

this is a major source of mercury,

and these substances

are causing real problems,

not just to dolphins, but to people,

because people and dolphins feed

at the same level of a food chain.

If you looked at bottlenose dolphins...

that's Flipper, by the way...

you'd discover, in fact,

these animals are swimming

toxic dump sites.

It's better to refrain

from taking those meats...

how do I say?

Too much.

But still dolphin meat

contains some valuable nutrients.

This is a matter

that the consumer affairs

and health ministries are looking after,

and I can assure you

that there is no product on the market

that exceeds any of their standards.

By their standards.

Almost nobody eats dolphin meat,

but 23,000 are slaughtered every year,

so that begs the question,

Where is all this meat going?

Dolphin meat is generally considered

to be a less desirable commodity,

and it would sell for far, far less

if it was properly labeled.

So the meat is distributed

much more widely than we recognize.

Scott Baker set up a portable DNA lab

at a hotel in downtown Tokyo.

We brought him samples,

and he analyzed them

and found that

a lot of the packages

that were labeled

as expensive meat from larger whales

was actually dolphin meat.

A consumer may think

they're buying healthy meat

from whales from

the southern hemisphere,

and they might be getting

a bottlenose dolphin

from the coast of Taiji

with levels of mercury

that are 20 times higher

than World Health

Organization recommendations.

The fishermen

who are eating dolphin

are poisoning themselves,

but they're also poisoning

the people that they're selling it to.

And the government knows this,

and the government's covering this up.

They had this problem

once before in Minamata.

That's where mercury poisoning

was first discovered.

They called it Minamata disease.

Japan has a history

of this terrible Minamata tragedy,

sometimes referred to

as Minamata disease.

But it's not a disease. It's not caught.

It's the result of this toxicity.

The most serious health risk

of these high levels of mercury

is to pregnant women.

It's the fetus that's most sensitive

to these levels of mercury.

The children were

starting to be born deformed.

And it's going to happen again.

Nobody has really looked

into the hospitals,

looked into the records

to see how many people

there have mercury poisoning.

The symptoms are memory loss,

loss of hearing,

loss of your eyesight.

It doesn't just knock you over dead.

It takes a while.

And that's happening.

Does he want to know

if he's poisoning the bodies

of other Japanese

that he's selling the meat to?

He doesn't want to know.

He doesn't want to know about it.

Well, in Minamata,

the government said

they weren't poisoning the people

in Minamata, either.

Remember that?

The Chisso factory?

The Chisso factory?

Same thing, same problem.

You don't think there's

a cover-up going on

with the amount of mercury

in dolphin meat?

I don't think that a similar

tragedy would happen

because of the dolphin meat.

I don't think so.

Ultimately, the dolphin meat

is based on supply and demand

like any other product,

and if that product is poison

and they can't sell it in Taiji,

then they can't sell it in Iwate,

and they can't sell it in Okinawa,

and they can't sell it wherever else

they're selling it.

So you have to stay focused

on that one lagoon in Taiji, I think,

in order to shut this down.

Howdy. How are you doing today?

If we got arrested,

how long before they charged us?

They don't have to

charge you with anything.

The way the law works in Japan,

they can keep you in jail

with no charges for 28 days.

are obtained by confessions

during those 28 days

because they can

torture you legally.

They can wake you up

in the middle of the night,

all night long, you know, and...

I've been doing that to them all week.

That may be aggressive...

Can we prosecute him?

I came to realize

that this was going to be

a much longer process,

so we utilized our time over there

doing reconnaissance, planning.

We observed.

There's two crews

that went in last night...

the guys that come

out of the tunnel.

They're sent to look on the left side.

They shine their flashlights.

They go pretty quick

because they want

to get to work and start out.

What they're doing is looking

for little snap branches.

They normally go up there

when they have dolphins

in the lagoon.

They go up and see if anybody's

photographed them.

What I'm thinking

is we go in there.

Maybe I use that location

that has a branch,

and I cut the branch on a night

when there's no dolphins.

There was two parts to the mission.

The first one was to get

the auditory experience.

Where can we drop a big

housing skull like this

with arms sticking out?

Let's try getting that.

We could plant hydrophones

on the side of the lagoon

that was easiest to get into.

It's a lot easier getting down

the left side of the lagoon.

The right side is right in the center

of the killing cove.

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