Update: Japan Stops Dolphin Slaughter

It turns out, movies can make a difference. Richard O'Barry, the dolphin trainer turned dolphin activist who is the central character in the documentary The Cove, announced this yesterday:

Today is September 1st, the first day of the dolphin slaughter season in Japan. But when I arrived today by bus from Kansai Airport with media representatives from all over the world, the notorious Cove from the movie was empty. There were no dolphin killers in sight.

...And as I was talking with the police, as the international journalists stood around listening, suddenly a camera crew arrived from Japan! And then another! And then still another!

You have to understand that this is SO IMPORTANT. These TV stations have REFUSED to cover the story in Taiji for years and years. NOW, for the first time, they have shown up, with cameras rolling.

Read Ryan Bradley's previous post about the film, and its filmmaker, here.

The Cove: Filmmaker's Team Infiltrates Japan's Dolphin Slaughter

Text by Ryan Bradley

Some stories are simple, straightforward, even easy. Louie Psihoyos isn't interested in them. A photographer for National Geographic when he was just 23, Psihoyos sought out assignments that were broad, vague, and visually challenging—subjects included dreams, garbage, and smell. He spent nine months in trash heaps. One time, he nearly fell to his death getting a photograph on top of the Chrysler Building.

So it should come as no surprise that for his first film, The Cove (released this month), the 52-year-old infiltrated a super-secret and heavily patrolled inlet in northern Japan with a crack team of extreme athletes and a bevy of military-grade cameras to capture a brutal and never before seen dolphin slaughter. What he did was by all accounts illegal and dangerous and borderline stupid. But so is killing a dolphin. 

“My mandate for this movie was: just make a difference,” Psihoyos (rhymes with "sequoias") says. “I took that to an extreme level. To do that, I realized, we had to become part of the story.”

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