Jan 30 2010
Watching The Cove
I finally did it.
As a mom of three small kids, I don’t get out much, and despite having promoted the screenings of the film “The Cove”, I never actually got the chance to go, myself. I had to wait for it to be available on Netflix, fercryingoutloud. But wait I did, and watch it, we all did.
It’s 11 P.M. Normally I’m long asleep by now. I can’t. I can’t actually close my eyes. I keep seeing Japanese whalers gaffing live dolphins, sinking hooks into their sleek flanks, and the water turning red. I keep hearing the screams.
I actually want to throw up.
Don’t get me wrong. I spent a lot of formative years of my life raising livestock, and I’m familiar with the concept of death = dinner. But the final kicker, that the dolphin meat is so toxic that eating it causes brain damage, and that the elected leadership of Taiji wants to feed it to their schoolchildren?
In the immortal question of the character Jayne from Firefly, “How’s a guy get so wrong?”
Thinking that a dolphin is nothing more than a meat creature? Sure. I can see that people might think that. Some people eat other people too. I may think it’s repulsive, but I can see the logic. But to fight so very very hard to kill an animal in order to consume flesh that will create death and disability in your own community? That is so pathological that it simply defies all belief and description.
But then again, one fecal coliform scare after another, and we still chow down burger as if it were OK for us to eat. We’re slow learners, our species.
I want to scream at the whalers, to plead with them, to somehow get them to a place where they understand that killing these beautiful, intelligent, self-aware creatures, so cruelly, is wrong. But then again, my dinner wasn’t killed humanely either. I do not hold moral high ground from the whalers unless I change some meal choices. But even if I went ahead and made those changes and took that high ground, I don’t know if you could ever have a successful, mutually-respectful, thought-provoking and change-inducing talk with someone who would then turn around and poison children for profit.
As the filmmaker says, many times throughout, “the bad guys just keep getting bigger and bigger.”
By and large, I see things wrong with the world, with how we interact with our environment, and I think “yeah, I can help, there, I can make a difference, I can do some small thing.” Right now, I feel like I am just staring into the face of something so awful, I can’t even think of anything to do or any way to help. Once an animal is so evil it takes another species down for no higher purpose than the slow, agonizing death and maiming of its own young, there’s nothing left to say, and no way to instigate change on an intellectual or moral level. I truly think you cannot reason with something that evil.
And so a great film was made. And so nothing at all has changed in the cove at Taiji. Broome, Australia pulled sister city status, and a lot more people know that the dolphins are dying, oh, and the city councilmen, at great personal risk, got the meat pulled from the school lunch program. Probably. Of course, they do mention in the film that the meat is mislabled as whale meat in some stores.
I’ll be commenting on the next logical film, Whale Wars, soon.
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