Killing Tradition: Inside Hunting and Animal Rights Controversies

Prologue: Taking Aim

1 prologue Taking Aim “We have been whaling in this town for centuries, so why shouldn’t we continue?” Yoshinori Shoji, vice chairman of the Japan SmallType Whaling Association, defensively addressed the reporter from the Guardian who had come to the tiny fishing village of Wadaura for the protest-filled opening of the 2007 whaling season (McCurry 2007). Aware that the protesters were declaring that the animals had rights, Shoji opined, “We have a right to decide what we eat” (Coleman 2007). Hearing his preparation of whale meat called an atrocity, he referred to it as tradition to justify its continuation. The community’s hunts had been part of the town’s social fabric for hundreds of years, and Shoji pointed out the family-owned boats and the customs passed down through many generations. Shoji was aware that world opinion was weighted against the whale hunters, but underscoring the cultural significance of whales to their folklife, he reminded reporters of the Japanese proposal for the International Whaling Commission to allow the hunting of minke whales by aboriginal people as a part of ceremonies or as a vital food source (Coleman 2007). The 1986 international ban on commercial whale hunting exempted the Baird beaked whale he had harpooned, but environmental groups, not satisfied with a partial ban, had stepped up their efforts to abolish all whale hunting and signal a new age for animal rights in the twenty-first century. For many people, the Save the Whales campaign was their first awareness of avid animal protectionism. The public began to take notice during the mid-1960s, when biologist Paul Spong began experiments in the Vancouver Aquarium to communicate with killer whales and then develop what appeared to be a play relationship with them. Spong attributed anthropomorphic qualities of depression, pain, joy, 2 KILLING TRADITION and even music making to the animal. This discovery was coincident with Flipper, a movie (1963) and hit television series (1964–1967) that revolved around a dolphin’s gratitude to a boy for saving it from being speared by heartless humans. The drama focused on the humans’ decision of whether to keep or release the animal, but the movie showed that the animal made up its own mind. Nonetheless, it was a leap from sympathizing with apparently smiling dolphins to playing with formidable killer whales. In 1968, Spong’s stirring pronouncement that, as highly intelligent social beings, the killer whales in Vancouver should be freed from captivity received wide media attention. Inspired by his call, a fledgling environmental activist group named Greenpeace, formed to protest nuclear tests in the Pacific, made news when its vessel the Phyllis Cormack confronted a Soviet whaling ship sixty miles off the coast of Eureka , California. Greenpeace positioned an inflatable Zodiac between the harpoon and a targeted whale, but the gunner fired anyway. The Japanese fishermen slaughter a Baird’s beaked whale at Wada Port on June 21, 2007, in Chiba, Japan. Under the coastal whaling program, Japan is allowed to hunt only a limited number of whales every year, and Wadaura villages are permitted to hunt twenty-six whales during the season that begins June 20 and ends August 31. (Photo by Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images) Prologue 3 filmed record of the activists risking their lives to protect whales from commercial interests generated worldwide interest in a post–civil rights direct-action movement. Before the end of the century, the social bonding attributed to killer whales became the basis for another boy-animal buddy movie portraying fishermen as the bad guys when Hollywood’s Free Willy (1993) and several sequels concluding with The Rescue (1997) made a splash at the box office. A stirring protest song called “Save the Whales,” released as a single by American rock performer Country Joe McDonald in 1975 and covered by the legendary counterculture band the Grateful Dead, became an anthem for environmental activists. Its lyrics reflected on the “good old days” of sail and bemoaned the “modern ship and a modern crew with sonar scopes and explodin’ harpoons / A mechanical boat made outta steel, a floating machine built to kill the whales” (McDonald 1994). In this repeatedly performed song, McDonald connected whale hunting and animal abuse to the corrupting force of commercial mass culture: There’re lots of whales in the deep blue sea, we kill them for the company We drag ’em ’longside and chop ’em in two and melt ’em down...