Besides creating beautiful art and hopefully selling much of it, one of my main resolutions is to spread the words as much as possible about the unbelievably (until you see it with your own eyes) Dolphin & Whale Slaughter that takes place mostly in Taiji Japan but also other places. Being defended as a “Tradition” few Japanese even know about, and when recently shown some of the footage on the streets of Tokyo most average Japanese recoiled in horror.

The Japanese Government has been doing all it can to uphold a black out so the world won’t find out just what is going on in “The Cove”!

Brave undercover covert operators have been able to infiltrate this cove and obtain footage. It’s now being exposed. I will do what Ic an to support this effort. Regardless where you stand on the issue of animals for food, when you learn the truth about this you will see that this is not about food. The main reason the dolphins and whales are killed is to “get rid of them” the Japanese government tells the fisherman Dolphins are “a pest”. They compete for the same fish the Japanese want to fish and they see them as competition. So they plan to wipe them all out!!! That is the truth behind all this. They may sell them as food but that is just a cover up to hide their true intentions, the extermination of the whales species to which dolphins belong!

It’s inexcusably, barbaric, and senseless and must be stopped. The sheer numbers of Dolphins killed are alarming alone. The methods are straight from hell!

http://www.opsociety.org/

http://www.thecovemovie.com/

Rent “The Cove” on YouTube

And to be fair this is going on in other places of the world. The international community must join to stop this. We the people must make this end!

http://www.savejapandolphins.org/blog.html

Dolphins have evolved over millions of years, adapting perfectly to life in the ocean. They are intelligent, social and self-aware, exhibiting evidence of a highly developed emotional sense. Here are just a few of the issues with captivity.

- Captures of dolphins are traumatic and stressful and can result in injury and death of dolphins. The number of dolphins that die during capture operations or shortly thereafter are never revealed in dolphinariums or swim-with-dolphins programs. Some facilities even claim their dolphins were “rescued” from the ocean and cannot be released. This claim is almost invariably false.

- Training of dolphins is often deliberately misrepresented by the captive dolphin industry to make it look as if dolphins perform because they like it. This isn’t the case. They are performing because they have been deprived of food.

Captivity is cruel – don’t go to a show!

- Most captive dolphins are confined in minuscule tanks containing chemically treated artificial seawater. Dolphins in a tank are severely restricted in using their highly developed sonar, which is one of the most damaging aspects of captivity. It is much like forcing a person to live in a hall of mirrors for the rest of their life their image always bouncing back with no clear direction in sight.

Make Your Pledge

Why Whales and other large Sea Animals do NOT belong in to captivity.

We know a lot about them and yet we know too little to safely house them permanently in fish tanks. Even though Atlanta’s Aquarium is “The Largest” in the world it’s still a fish bowl compared to the large oceans and the great depths,changes in pressure and temperatures, these animals are accustomed to. Their sonar is so sophisticated that it reverberates through miles of oceans, that alone would make it cruel to confine them in a comparable small space. It’s simply ridiculous the think that they are just fine as long as we have all these so called experts take care of them. We just can no replicate the true ocean environment. Keeping them as attractions is really a selfish act. I know, I too often feel that the very fact that we have close encounters and that we can expose our children to them through these aquariums helps to make the important to us, but I wish we could find as way to make them important to us just because they deserve to be important. Maybe if we teach children early on that all life is sacred or important and must be respected, we would not have to confine some of them to show kids how cute they are and therefore deserving of life.

Can you imagine the idea that we have to keep a zoo of different humans just to teach us how wonderful and important we are?

Beluga Whale at US Aquarium Dies

A female beluga whale that had fallen ill at an Atlanta aquarium, died early Saturday morning, aquarium officials said.

The female whale, Marina, died about 2 a.m. Saturday, said Jeff Swanagan, the president and executive director of the Georgia Aquarium, touted as the world’s largest.

“She was showing increased disorientation in her swimming behavior. Then she stopped swimming and stopped breathing,” he said.

Officials do not know why the whale died. Swanagan said the aquarium would conduct a necropsy on Saturday to determine the cause of the whale’s death, focusing on the whale’s central nervous system.

The whale had stopped eating on Nov. 22 and had become disoriented, injuring her chin. She had been kept under 24-hour watch by aquarium staff and veternarians. About 16 staff members and volunteers were in her pool when she died, he said.

Marina was the second-oldest of four beluga whales at the aquarium. She was one of three whales that were transferred in November 2005 from Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium.

“We are saddened by the death of Marina,” officials from the New York Aquarium said in a statement. “Georgia Aquarium’s staff worked very hard to care for Marina during this critical time.”

The three other beluga whales at the Georgia Aquarium — Nico, Maris and Natasha — are eating normally, the aquarium said.

Another beluga whale, Gasper, was euthanized at the Atlanta aquarium on Jan. 2 after a long battle with bone disease and a weakened immune system.

Two whale sharks — among the aquarium’s first stars when it opened in 2005 — died in June and in January. A chemical used to treat their exhibit is believed to have led the whale sharks — named Ralph and Norton — to lose their appetites and eventually die, said aquarium spokesman Dave Santucci.

“We have to accept the whole life cycle here as biologists and our public does, too — while you have all these births you also have deaths,” Swanagan said. “It’s part of the living collection. It’s hard on us.”