Drive Hunts - What You Can Do

1. Don't visit marine parks or aquariums that hold whales or dolphins. There is a chance that they may have been captured during a drive hunt. Drive hunters make money because aquariums pay them for the dolphins they capture, so it gives them an incentive to keep doing it.

2. Send an email to your nearest Japanese Embassy or Consulate by using our e-protests here

... if you are based in the US please click here
... if you are based in the UK please click here

... if you are based in Australia please click here

... if you are based in Germany please click here

If your country is not listed here please write to the Prime Minister of Japan, see below. Thanks!

3. Copy the text below and send it to the Prime Minister of Japan, Mr Yoshihiko Noda, or send your own polite comment on the hunts.

Dear Prime Minister

The dolphin drive hunts resumed on September 1st, and I am alarmed by reports that more than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises may be brutally killed this year off the coast of Japan.

Dolphin drive hunts
One method of hunting is the drive hunt, in which large groups of small whales and dolphins are rounded up using boats and driven towards the shore where they are trapped in a bay or cove using nets. The animals are then killed in the shallows with knives or taken away to a slaughterhouse. The hunt can take place over a number of days, with the animals trapped and frightened. The slaughter process itself is crude and brutal. In addition, Japanese consumers are being sold dolphin meat, containing dangerously high levels of mercury, often labeled as whale meat.

Fueled by the aquarium industry
A number of the trapped animals are kept alive and selected by aquariums and marine parks that pay large sums of money for animals to display in their facilities; this is the financial backbone of the drive hunts and is increasingly becoming the motivating factor behind the continuation. The dolphins taken alive are handled crudely, many dying of stress during the process or facing shortened, impoverished lives in captivity.

I respectfully ask that the Japanese government revoke the permits that allow these hunts to continue.

Sincerely,

[add your name here]