The Rhetoric of Fishing: Best Approaches to Support Sustainability

 

The focused rhetoric of The Cove succeeds where the environmental ethics perspectives of Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line fail to convey the same emotional power. Ultimately, even though animal liberation arguments may privilege some elements of the natural world over others, such an individualized approach has been shown to have more effective results. According to Ric O’Barry, the Taiji dolphin slaughter was suspended in September 2009 because of the publicity surrounding the film, The Cove (“Save Japan Dolphins), and as late as March 2, 2011, Taiji fishermen were returning to traditional fishing practices rather than dolphin slaughter. Even though dolphin killing continues, it has “drastically decreased compared to previous seasons,” O’Barry explains (“Save Japan Dolphins”). 

Today O’Barry is continuing to garner support from Japanese journalists and local students and community members in Wakayama City, Tokyo, and other towns throughout the country. O’Barry sees this response to The Cove as a major victory because, “Our Save Japan Dolphins Team and I have been meeting with media for years about the dolphin slaughter in Japan, but now the Japanese media is coming to us!” According to O’Barry, they opened The Cove in Japan despite intense opposition and a press conference after the film’s release “was attended by over 100 media representatives, including every major broadcast outlet” (“Save Japan Dolphins”). Because of the continuing success of The Cove, dolphin slaughter is on the wane. 

Perhaps, then, films taking an organismic approach to eco-resistance might learn from the strategies invoked in a powerful animal liberation film like The Cove. As Holmes Bolston, III explains, “Development in the West has been based on the Enlightenment myth of endless growth…. [Yet] none of the developed nations have yet settled into sustainable culture on their landscapes” (528). By moving from an animal rights perspective to an animal welfare approach, environmentalists may find a way to individualize environmental issues without diluting the need for a biotic community. An animal welfare approach can provide an emotional center missing from both Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line and, perhaps, facilitate an eco-activist response that culminates in the powerful eco-resistance that is central to The Cove. The End of the Line could, for example, “humanize” selected species of aquatic life, demonstrating that they, like humans, have rights. A film similar to Darwin’s Nightmare might both highlight aquatic biospheres in which environmental changes might address species disruption and highlight native species worth saving because of their sentience. Such a focus on both individual species and their biotic communities could have the same result as the animal rights focus of The Cove: more than two million signatures on a petition that will, it is hoped, end dolphin slaughter for good.

The Cove and Dolphin Sentience

 The slaughter Ric O'Barry and his crew capture on film becomes the climax of The Cove, serving as the strongest animal rights argument in the film. Before all cameras have been planted in the hidden cove, from a distance the team films a dolphin trying to get away, leaving a trail of blood in the water in its wake. After the team plants the audio equipment, they listen to the dolphins scream in the cove. The sounds demonstrate that each dolphin is aware of its coming death. They anticipate their own slaughter, O’Barry explains. 

But it is after cameras are planted that the most shocking evidence against such slaughter is revealed. Ric and the team watch monitors showing fishermen on shore around a fire telling stories about whaling missions around the globe. Other shots show fishermen standing in boats and placing barriers across the cove. The fishermen herd in dolphins, disorienting them with constant tapping noises. Once they herd in the dolphins, fishermen begin the slaughter, stabbing dolphins repeatedly with harpoons. The water turns red with blood. Dolphin screams fill the soundtrack. The harpooning continues until all the dolphins are dead. The water is ruby red, but dolphins caught in nets are pierced again and again. They try to escape but are caught in this cove fortress. Carcasses are ripped on board the boats, but fishermen smoke nonchalantly, even diving into the bloody water in search of more bodies. The dolphins are dragged like harpooned whales. These images contrast with majestic shots of dolphins swimming freely in the sea. 

 The footage of the slaughter becomes O’Barry’s proof of dolphins’ sentience. Their suffering is clear on the video screen he shows a town spokesman and the members of the International Whaling Commission. And these shocking images get results. Small countries paid off by the Japanese leave the IWC, and dolphin meat is no longer allowed in school lunches, for example. By building an argument that first demonstrates dolphins’ equality because they, like humans, are both sentient and self-aware, The Cove draws on animal rights arguments. It also effectively takes that argument one-step further. Because dolphins are sentient and self-aware, their slaughter must end.

The Cove and Logical Reasoning

 

The Cove asserts both logical and emotional reasons why the dolphins should be saved. For example, the film provides practical reasons why humans should avoid dolphin meat, if they value their health, explaining that dolphin meat has toxic levels of mercury; yet, it is donated to area schools for lunch programs and disguised as whale meat in Tokyo markets. 

A history of problems with mercury poisoning is shown to support this claim, especially those recounting mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan in 1956, where the government covered up toxicity levels caused by industrial dumping. Fetuses were most affected, so children were born deformed, losing sight and hearing. Dolphins’ connection with humans is also used as a reason to stop the dolphins' slaughter. 

As perhaps the most intelligent sea creature, dolphins have been known to protect humans, are self-aware, and have the ability to learn language, skills only intelligent creatures can achieve.

The Cove as Rhetorical Documentary: Part I

 

The Cove establishes the worth of dolphins but also assumes, because they have historically been viewed as sentient creatures, that viewers will immediately call for action, once the slaughter at Taiji Cove is revealed. “We tried to do the story legally,” we’re told at the opening of this documentary revealing this dolphin slaughter in a cove in Taiji, Japan, “A little town with a really big secret.” 

Ric O’Barry’s attempts to film the slaughter are continually hampered by local authorities until he partners with the film’s director Louie Psihoyos. O’Barry never planned to be an activist, he explains, but after one of the dolphins he had trained killed herself in his arms by cutting off her own oxygen supply, he became a dolphin advocate, freeing as many as possible and preventing their slaughter. But dolphins are such great performers they have become a huge commodity worth $150,000.00 apiece for Sea World shows. Because thousands of dolphins come to Taiji each year, dolphin trainers collect dolphins there, bringing 2.3 million dollars a year to the area. The remaining dolphins herded into the cove are slaughtered for food, O’Barry explains, but he needs filmic proof to present to the world, so he can stop the catastrophe. 

Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and Netscape CEO Jim Clark join forces with O’Barry to accomplish this mission, helping him build a team of experts to plant cameras and microphones, even hiring George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic to construct artificial rocks in which they can hide cameras in the cove. They bring in world-class divers, a military expert, and a rock concert organizer to facilitate the mission, and the film documents the process these experts follow to plan and execute their goal to film the slaughter in two stages: they first plant audio equipment, and then, in Mission 2: The Full Orchestra, the team hides cameras around the cove.