The Dolphin in the Mirror Page 24
Taiji represented a very complex situation, and in the four years I had been working to stop the drives, my colleagues and I had suffered some setbacks. I had visited Japan two months prior to the marine mammal conference, having been invited to a small conference on vocal learning at Keio University in Tokyo to speak about vocal imitation in dolphins. I took advantage of this trip to meet with the director of the Nagoya Aquarium, one of the largest and most modern aquariums in Japan, and give a talk to its marine mammal staff. It was hard for me to believe that this aquarium procured its dolphins from the drive hunts, especially since its director was a well-known turtle conservationist. Paul Boyle and I thought that perhaps such a meeting would serve to open communication about the dolphin drives and that we might be able to find a Japanese ally, a conservation-minded leader in the aquarium community who would spearhead local efforts to end the hunts. I spoke privately to the director and asked him to explain the rationale for continuing the drives. He turned to me, seemingly uncomfortable, and said that the aquarium was subsidized in part by the government of Japan and that it had instructed the aquarium to take dolphins from the drive. The government considered dolphins competitors for fish, and so they had to be exterminated. The director said of the drive hunts, "It is a pest-control operation, because the dolphins are depleting local fish stocks." There is in fact no scientific support for this claim, and overfishing is much more likely to be the cause of declining fish populations.
On the national stage, various authorities offered different rationales. In response to the assertion that the animals suffer prolonged pain, Jun Koda, a counselor of the Japanese embassy in London, said that the fishermen were careful to minimize pain, and every dolphin "almost instantly meets its end within a maximum of 30 seconds and does not suffer any pain."1 As I told Louie, this was obviously not true, as even the shortest of video clips attested. The dolphins were eviscerated alive, suffering very slow deaths.
Cultural differences are often raised to deflect criticism. "If someone eats a cow, why should one object to a dolphin being eaten?" asks Hideki Moronuki, an official in the Ministry of Agriculture. "They're all mammals."2 This is true, now many slaughterhouses make efforts to minimize pain and suffering; there are growing efforts to minimize pain and suffering in farm animals as well. Many improvements are needed, but dolphins are within my area of expertise, and their welfare is my concern. I want to end the drive hunts, period. These animals need global protection. But the manner by which an animal is killed is certainly relevant in the overall argument. The government of Japan's final defense of the hunts amounts to "It's part of our culture." "The feeling here is that the world needs to respect cultural differences," Tetsu Sato, a professor of environmental management at Nagano University, told a reporter for the New York Times in the fall of 2009. "Why should there even be a debate on this issue?"3 There is a debate on the issue because the issue is not about cultural differences. It is about the inhumane treatment of intelligent, sentient creatures. We don't accept cultural differences in the mistreatment of humans, and it is no better an excuse for mistreatment of sentient animals.
Louie listened patiently and intently to my case, and I showed him videotapes of the drive hunts. I then introduced him to Hardy Jones, an environmental filmmaker who'd devoted much of his later career to the welfare of dolphins and whales. That evening we attended a short film of Hardy's on the drive hunts. It had been Hardy who, four years earlier, had effectively recruited me to join the campaign to end the Taiji drive hunts. When Louie and I parted, he told me that he was interested in the prospect but couldn't say for sure if he would be able to do it. He would let me know.
***
A year and a half before the San Diego conference, I had faced my greatest setback yet in the campaign. The rain was sheeting down as Paul Boyle, Steve Olson—the vice president of government affairs for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums—and I were chauffeured north along the ultra-chic Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. We were nervous, or at least I was, but we had a degree of optimism despite the rain, an expectation that carefully presented scientific argument would generate genuine insight and lead to a collaborative path toward the success of our cause. It was the last day of March in 2004, Steve's birthday, as it happened, and as our driver stopped at 2520 Massachusetts Avenue, the embassy of Japan, we looked at one another and silently agreed: Okay, this is our one big chance!
Our goal was straightforward. We aimed to persuade the embassy's first secretary of fisheries that the annual drive hunts of dolphins in Taiji were patently inhumane and should be stopped and then have him transmit this message to the office of the prime minister in Tokyo. When I'd arranged the meeting I was told to bring any scientific evidence I had to make my case.
Given my theatrical background, I planned to use the Miracle on 34th Street model to achieve the goal. In the 1947 film by that name, Kris Kringle, a kindly old man who believes himself to be Santa Claus and plays that role in the Macy's department store in Manhattan, is committed to an institution because of his insane belief. Judge Harper demands that Kringle's lawyer produce material proof that Kringle is indeed who he claims to be or the old man will languish in the institution for a very long time. A little twist of Hollywood storytelling allows the lawyer to place before the judge fifty thousand letters addressed to Santa Claus, all delivered to Kringle by the U.S. Post Office. Faced with such massive evidence, the judge feels compelled to rule that Mr. Kringle must indeed be who he says he is.
Miracle on 34th Street was fiction, whereas the drive hunts at Taiji were unrelenting reality. And the letters to Santa proved a fiction within the fiction, whereas we aimed to prove scientific facts. But I liked the idea that overwhelming evidence had the power to convince even the most skeptical judge. And the Japanese authorities had shown themselves to be skeptical about protests of the Taiji drive hunts. Our massive evidence that day at the Japanese embassy was contained in three very large boxes of scientific papers labeled, respectively, ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY, SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, and INTELLIGENCE. Collectively, these three boxes of learned articles represented everything known to science about dolphins.
We were convinced that this body of evidence showed dolphins to be creatures with intellectual, social, and emotional lives on at least the level of chimpanzees, and in some cases even more highly developed. If it was true, and it was, then the drive hunts at Taiji were grossly inhumane. We hoped that, like Judge Harper, the first secretary would be convinced. After all, Japanese primatologists were leaders in research on chimpanzee intelligence and behavior, and great apes were revered in Japanese culture. The slaughtering of apes was illegal, and only poachers in Africa attempted it. It seemed to us that dolphins were not revered in the same way as apes because people lacked the relevant information, and we were going to provide that information.
We were met by a lawyer, Gavin Carter, who represented Japanese interests at meetings of the International Whaling Commission. He was very British and had a kind face, but he was like a rock underneath. I had come to this meeting at the embassy with good advice from my uncle, who had been the head of international trade with the East during the Eisenhower administration. "Negotiations with the Japanese are different than with Americans," he'd told me days earlier. "In the States, you don't have to know someone in order to close a business deal. Not so in Japan. But once you have a relationship with someone, then you can do business." We didn't have much time to get to know the other party, but I was determined to reach out and establish a rapport, not treat the meeting as a confrontation. We were determined to avoid being the ugly Americans, dictating to other countries how they should behave. We wanted to share our science, and then we hoped the government would want to do the right thing.
The first secretary entered, immaculately turned out, like everyone and everything around us. For so senior an official, he was young, much younger than I had expected, perhaps in his thirties. And at no more than five foot seven, this young man didn't tower over
me the way most of the men I encountered did. He extended his arm, we shook hands; he bowed slightly in the formal Japanese way, and I lowered my head too. To my surprise, I saw that this senior bureaucrat was wearing black sneakers. This incongruity caused an irrational thought to pop into my head: Maybe we have a chance!
***
The first secretary led Paul, Steve, and me to a large conference room dominated by a vast rectangular table. The room was windowless and quite dark. As we had requested, it was set up for a PowerPoint presentation, with a screen at the far end of the table. We put our Miracle on 34th Street–style evidence, the three boxes of academic papers, on a side table. I hooked up my laptop to the projection system and prepared to open the meeting with a rapid excursion through what we knew about dolphin intelligence, communication, and social behavior.
We were actually a little surprised to find ourselves in the embassy that dreary March day because the notion had only entered our thoughts a bare few months earlier. I had been giving a paper at another MMS conference in December 2003. Right after the paper's presentation, Naomi Rose and Courtney Vail came up to me to discuss the drive hunts.
Naomi was a senior scientist for the Humane Society International, specializing in global marine mammal protection issues, and Courtney was the U.S. policy officer for the British-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. They had a joint booth at the conference, an indication of how the dolphin killing in Taiji was bringing together organizations and people from different backgrounds in a unified effort that was truly remarkable. Naomi and Courtney told me that they had tried to get a meeting at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., to press their case. "They would only agree to meet us at five o'clock," explained Naomi. "The embassy was just closing for public business for the day, so we knew it was a brushoff. They wouldn't even let us through the front doors!" Courtney told me that she and Naomi had wanted to give the embassy official just one scientific paper that spoke to dolphin intelligence and the issue of the inhumanity of the drive hunts. "We thought that your paper with Lori on mirror self-recognition was the most powerful one," Courtney said. "We had it with us. They took it and told us that while they were not prepared to talk to animal rights groups or environmental groups, they would be prepared to meet with the author of the paper, as a scientist. You just need to call them to set up a meeting."
Our principal concern in planning for the meeting was staying on message: the drive hunts at Taiji were brutally inhumane and should therefore be stopped. Paul was especially insistent that we had to, as he kept putting it, "stay on this square" during our projected meeting. Straying into any other area—cultural traditions, sustainability of the hunts, whether dolphins should be killed at all— immediately allowed the Japanese to throw up a smoke screen that obscured the main issue. We recruited Steve Olson, with his expertise in government affairs, into our discussions, and eventually to our delegation, because he brought bureaucratic savvy and gravitas to our mission.
I titled my presentation "A Mind in the Water: A Review of the Scientific Literature on Dolphins." It was a celebration of dolphin intelligence in many realms—their brains, their awareness of self, their sentience, their social complexity. I stressed that even though dolphin and primate bodies were very different from each other in form and evolutionary history, dolphin and primate minds were very similar. I felt it was critical to present a portrait of the dolphin in a new frame. I acknowledged that the Japanese scientists were leaders in the field of ape cognition and pointed out that dolphins were cognitive cousins of the apes. It was quite an excursion in forty minutes.
I stuck almost exclusively to the science, but I did show some footage of drive hunts. That was a very special moment, because I knew that no one else had been able to do that in such a context. I also played them the plaintive distress calls of individual dolphins during a drive. And I showed a two-page spread of the blood-red waters of the cove at the island of Iki that had been published in National Geographic magazine in 1979. I finished the presentation with the following statement:
We respectfully ask the Japanese government to take action in stopping the inhumane practices of the dolphin drive fisheries in Japan. Scientists have now found many parallels in the social complexity and cognitive abilities between the great apes and dolphins. Recently, dolphins have been shown to possess a high level of awareness previously observed only in humans and the great apes. While great apes are revered and appreciated in Japan, dolphins—cognitive cousins of the great apes—are still harvested as a resource. Please let science guide your future policy regarding drive fisheries in Japan. We ask that you lead the way and take action in stopping this inhumane practice immediately.
As I'd been giving the presentation, I'd tried to get a sense of my audience. Were they really listening? For the most part, it was hard to discern what either one of them was thinking. The footage of the drive hunts did elicit some involuntary giggling, a typical Japanese response to embarrassment, as I later learned. Gavin Carter's face began to redden, but I didn't know what to make of it.
When I finished, I politely thanked the first secretary for listening. Paul began to draw the link between the science that had just been presented and the inevitable conclusion that drive hunts were brutal and inhumane, just as we had planned. But he didn't get very far. "Dr. Boyle, how can you tell us to stop this practice at Taiji when the United States is a whaling nation?" interrupted the first secretary, his jaw tight. These were the first words out of his mouth. We were caught completely off-guard. "What are you talking about?" Steve asked. "Your own Native Americans kill whales in the Northwest," the first secretary shot back. He was apparently talking about the Makah Indians. The issue of whether the Makah Indians should be allowed to hunt gray whales had been a contentious one for many years, politically and legally.
An 1855 treaty with the United States allowed the Makah to hunt whales as part of an agreement to cede their rights to large segments of their land. But late-twentieth-century global sensitivity to killing whales had prompted opposition to the treaty, and a legal battle had ensued. The Makah eventually won their case (with their legal fees provided by the Japanese government). Steve responded to the first secretary by pointing out that the Makah hunted for subsistence only, that very few animals were killed each year (it was limited to five under a new agreement), and that attempts were made to minimize suffering (the whale was harpooned by traditional methods and then immediately killed with a high-powered rifle). Here we were, not five minutes into the postpresentation discussion, and the Japanese official had already pulled us off Paul's square.
There followed a little more than two hours of a very polite, but increasingly tense, tug of war. Every attempt on our part to return the discussion to the issue of the hunt was met on their part by detailed and often unanswerable questions. They asked which animals should be eaten and which should not be; they asked about humane killing practices. They brought up issues about the Makah. We were in danger of losing the focus of our meeting.
We also discussed our belief that neither aquariums nor dolphin swim programs should be procuring dolphins from the hunt, and in fact, that very day, the board of directors of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums issued the following resolution: "Zoos and aquariums accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) are experts in animal care, wildlife conservation and educating the public about wildlife issues. The AZA strongly believes that the killing of dolphins and whales in drive fisheries is inhumane and should be terminated immediately."
Afterward, Paul described the Japanese tactics as the black-smoke effect. "It's like you can't see across the room, because of all this black smoke that has been deliberately created." It was all very respectful and businesslike. When it was over, Steve politely thanked the first secretary for agreeing to speak with us. The first secretary bowed slightly and said it had been a pleasure. We asked for a timely response from the Japanese government and agreed to supply more information to the embassy
if requested to, and the first secretary agreed to draw up a list of further questions for us.
In hindsight, we had been naive in the extreme, practically delusional. We had expected a moment of enlightenment to arise from this one small face-to-face meeting. What had we been thinking? And why had they even bothered to meet with us at all?
There was a palpable silence from the embassy for the next three months. Finally, after Steve called the embassy, Gavin Carter e-mailed us with the promised list of questions. As had happened during the discussion at the embassy, the questions were so convoluted and vague as to defy a ready response. How intelligent did an animal have to be before it was no longer ethical to kill it and eat it? Why was it all right for Native Americans to kill a small number of whales? Did the number of animals killed affect how ethical a particular hunt was? Did we plan to stop other nations from killing whales too? Steve described the collection of questions as being "masterfully done, with no simple answers to anything." Paul and I were willing to respond to the letter, and in fact drafted some answers. Ultimately, Steve persuaded us that it would be a waste of our time. Just as the meeting at the embassy had done, Gavin's letter sidestepped the single, simple question at the heart of the Taiji drive hunts: Is the oikomi drive and subsequent killing inhumane? No amount of intellectual contortion on our part over questions that were essentially irrelevant would get them to focus on that point. We collectively decided not to respond.
Over the following eighteen months, the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums joined the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in issuing a formal resolution condemning the drive hunts at Taiji. The Act for Dolphins website that Paul Boyle, Lori Marino, and I established gathered two hundred and fifty thousand signatures on a petition to stop the drives, and it garnered some coverage in the media. A press conference that we orchestrated through Act for Dolphins was held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. in 2005; all the most important scientific voices against the Taiji drives were gathered, but the event was all but eclipsed by the timing of a major veto on stem-cell research by the Bush administration.