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| Photograph of mother and baby dolphin courtesy of Dolphin Quest |
The Cove: Understanding Japan’s Dolphin Drive Fishery and the Myths Surrounding It
The Cove is a 2009 award-winning documentary that exposes the annual drive fishery hunt of dolphins and whales in the whaling village of Taiji, Wakayama, Japan.
Drive fisheries are not historically new. Several countries aside from Japan have used, or still use, this method to hunt animals, including the Solomon Islands, the Faroe Islands and Peru. The drive fishery at Taiji is believed to have existed for more than 350 years. However, The Cove was not the first to document this controversial hunt—publications such as National Geographic and television series by the late Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the mid-1970s also highlighted it. Many people have rightly raised concerns about these hunting methods, questioning them on moral, ethical and animal-welfare grounds.
