Yesterday EIA and Campaign Whale supporters joined other campaigners to demonstrate outside the Japanese embassy in London.
The protests, which took place around the world, attracted a lot of media - you can read one of the articles here:
http://news.aol.co.uk/environment-news/protest-over-dolphin-hunting/article/20080903091326171017775
Interesting article debating the applicability of IUCN conservation criteria to cetaceans, including the Dall’s porpoise.
On September 3rd, 2008, people will be gathering in cities all over the world to peacefully protest Japan’s continued slaughter of around 20,000 small cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises and small whales) each year. EIA and Campaign Whale have participated in this annual international protest for several years and our campaigners will be taking part in the UK protest in London.
Initially the protest was aimed at raising awareness of the dolphin drive hunts in Taiji, a small fishing village in the south of Japan where several thousand dolphins are herded into killing coves and either slaughtered for their meat or caught live for aquaria. In recent years, the protest has expanded to include the Dall’s porpoise hunt, as well as the implications of the sale of toxic dolphin, porpoise and whale meat for Japanese consumers.
For more details of the worldwide protest, visit http://www.savejapandolphins.org/blog.html
The UK protest will take place outside the Japanese embassy in London (101-104 Piccadilly, London W1J 7JT - nearest tube Green Park) from 12 midday to 2pm, on Wednesday 3rd September. Protesters are asked to wear a red t-shirt or shirt to symbolise the thousands of cetaceans killed in the slaughter each year.
Please join us there!
A place to regularly see Dall’s porpoises
http://5starwhales.blogspot.com/2008/07/five-for-five-star-july-28th-2008.html
Picture taken in Haro Strait, courtesy of Five Star Whale Watching
The 60th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) took place in Santiago, Chile in June 2008. Although the focus of this annual meeting is the great whales, we wanted to ensure that member governments were aware that the Dall’s porpoise hunt in Japan is the largest direct hunt in the world of any cetacean species, and that the IWC had a responsibility to address this and other ’small cetacean’ hunts.
This year a group of scientists presented a paper to the Scientific Committee on the Dall’s porpoise which demonstrated that the current quotas were many times higher than would be calculated under other globally accepted management schemes. The Scientific Commitee expressed its extreme concern about the 15,000 Dall’s porpoises being killed every year in Japan’s coastal waters and recommended that the hunt be reduced to sustainable levels. It also noted that catch levels do not include the unknown number of porpoises that are killed in fishing nets or struck by the hunters but lost, most likely dying.
As many as 15 IWC member governments made strong statements of concern during the debate, including UK, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, New Zealand, US, Portugal and Nicaragua. Japan was asked if it would implement the recommendations of the Scientific Committee but declined to reply. The UK said “The information submitted to the Scientific Committee suggests that the current hunt is indeed highly unsustainable and the outlook for these Dall’s porpoises populations is extremely poor. I sincerely hope that in the new spirit of cooperation in the IWC, Japan will indicate its willingness to embrace the majority view in this Commission that the IWC has the mandate to address all small cetaceans, and act accordingly.”
The Japanese delegation has in the past indicated that it will discuss the Dall’s porpoise bilaterally with IWC member governments, so we are now writing to those governments to request that they follow up their statements directly with the Fisheries Agency of Japan.
Welcome to this new website dedicated to a very special species, the Dall’s porpoise. We will update this page with news related to Dall’s porpoise as often as we can. Any questions, comments, posts, please direct them to info@dallsporpoise.org
Enjoy the website
