[Buddha-l] Compassion and corporate fish depletion, slaughter, etc

[jkirk]

http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2306
Taiji: Japan's Dolphin Cull and the Clash of Cultures

This article is about dolphin slaughter in a small, rather off the beaten 
path shore town in Japan: Taiji. It's enough to turn me into a vegetarian 
(not that I eat dolphin, or tuna for that matter), but if you can't deal 
with the first part of the article, please read the part about a guy who 
once trained dolphins, then saw the cruelty of that and of holding them in 
captivity, and became a campaigner of compassion to stop the drift-nets 
capture and slaughter of thousands of these cetaceans. That section is 
titled, "An Interview with Ric O'Barry."

The actual culture clash is not with the whole of Japan but with the people 
living in three small towns, among them Taiji, who don't want to stop 
fishing with drift-nets, that literally rake up everything. (As the article 
notes, they aren't the only ones in the world to use these nets. But their 
dolphin kill is the world's largest.) Some scientists have already published 
warnings that the sea is being rapidly depleted of both fish and the 
habitats they need in order to survive. O'Barry says that in Japan at large 
there is a gigantic news blackout about the dolphin slaughter, so that few 
Japanese even know about it. (He doesn't go into the whale hunting 
situation, either there or in Norway.)

There's a jataka tale about a crane and some gullible fish, who all got 
eaten, but when the crane tried it on a crab, he lost his head to the crab's 
pincers. Alas, the creators of jataka stories didn't know about dolphins, 
among the most intelligent of water creatures, who yet are as helpless 
before the human cranes of this world as were the fish in the shallow pond. 
The tree fairy's comment on all this was:
                  Guile profits not your very guileful folk.
                  Mark what the guileful crane got from the crab!
Our guileful technology is doing us in as surely as the crane was done in by 
the crab.

Joanna