With great alacrity do these noble fishermen, spear held aloft, carry on their hunt. Though not dressed in traditional garb or manning the small thatched canoes of their ancestors, roughly 26 men clamber into vessels at the edge of their steep, rocky shoreline. This year, as in every year, the small seaside village of Taiji at the southernmost reach of Japan's great archipelago prepare for what some may see as the most barbaric and savage of seasons. Though tradition metes out sometimes harsh realities upon our gentler and more prosaic lives, even this seems a bit harsh and out of character from the honorable people who brought us the serene sounds of haiku and nature worshiping Shinto. Nets and loud noises are used to coral these creatures, at once regarded for their poise and intelligence and their copper-like, moist flesh, into a shallow cove where they are at once beaten, speared and eviscerated. With salacious gusto, barbed gafs are employed by the men, as is threshing the very waters, to stab, pinion and pierce the writhing beasts. Hoisting them into their boats, laden with the flesh and disembodied death-mates, clicking-their dying calls. These are the last rites of what most would consider our closest cousin (of the swimming kind).
This has not gone unnoticed. An onslaught of of publicity and the requisite public outcry met these fishermen and their grand tradition. Many conservation, animal protection and environmental activists have swum to the aide of the dolphins. In trying to interject themselves between boat and bottle-nose, many have found themselves at the intersection of the end of a spear and the end of their life.
"Thus, it was a traumatic experience that our values were attacked fiercely by western environmentalists and animal right activists." S. Hamanaka, Mayor and The People of Taiji
If the honorable Hamanaka-san is terrified by the ado stirred by the blood-roaled waters, he may want turn away, eyes cast geisha-like down when the boats come to port, bearing fins and flippers and the mercurial ire of the global community.
So we come to the grand irony, the symbolic gest. If like ours, the dolphin's proto-hand, under all the pressures of aquatic Darwanism, had taken to fingers as swimmingly as humans, they would be raising a solitary digit to these clandestinely suicidal fishermen and their compatriots who will purchase, consume and be poisoned by the very meats that they are taking such heat for partaking of.
ScienceDirect.com reveals that according to the Japanese ministry of health has found that the mercury levels found in the liver and other tastier and sought after organs "exceeds the permitted level by approximately 5000 times and the consumption of only 0.15 g of liver" and offers "the possibility of an acute intoxication by T-Hg (mercury concentration) even after a single consumption of the product."
So, the fishing village of Taiji finds itself in one clandestinely satiric situation. The very act of thumbing their nose at the conviction, conventions and custom-culling modern society will be the literal death of them. Very poetic really. In order to stave off the demise of their traditional fishing rights, they continue to kill the dolphins, which spells certain death to the villagers. If one was to view this as an outsider, as every man, woman and child outside of this piteous, execrable little far off land does, it would be lauded as the single most insane and Socaratic-ally suicidal venture in man's great fallible riddled history.
Yet, in the words of the mayor, espousing great philosophy in his A Message from Taiji, addressing the International Whaling Commission and other critics of the slaughterings ..."We are proud of our own heritage and want to hand it down to the next generations." (See mercury poisoning=no next generation.) "We believe we know more about our own sea in Taiji than anyone who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away from us."
Speaking for the dolphins posthumously, that remains to be proven.
See Also : Accidental Death
No comments:
Post a Comment