TAIJI JAPAN- DOLPHIN SLAUGHTER.

Dolphin drive hunting (dolphin drive fishing) is a manner of hunting dolphins. It involves driving them together with boats and then into a bay, onto a beach, or into a cove. Their escape is prevented by closing off the route to the open sea or ocean with boats and nets. Dolphins are hunted this way in several places around the world, including the Soloman Islands, the Faroe Islands, Peru, and Japan. Dolphins are mostly hunted for their meat; some are captured and end up in dolphinariums. In Japan, Striped, Spotted, Risso's, and Bottlenose dolphins are most commonly hunted. The Japanese town of Taiji on the Kii peninsula is as of now the only town in Japan where drive hunting still takes place on a large scale. In Japan, the hunting is done by a select group of fishermen^. When a pod of dolphins has been spotted, they're driven into a bay by the fishermen while banging on metal rods in the water to scare and confuse the dolphins. When the dolphins are in the bay, it is quickly closed off with nets so the dolphins cannot escape. The dolphins aren't usually caught and killed immediately, but instead left to calm down over night. The following day, the dolphins are caught one by one and killed. The killing of the animals used to be done by slitting their throats, but the Japanese government banned this method and now dolphins may 'officially' only be killed by driving a metal rod into the neck of the dolphin, which causes them to die within seconds according to a memo from Senzo Uchida, the executive secretary of the Japan Cetacean Conference on Zoological Gardens and Aquariums. It is not clear if this ban is strictly enforced however, as eyewitness reports of similar throat-slitting and evisceration style killings were reported as late as October and November 2006. Certain hand-picked ( by dolphin trainers) dolphins are left alive and taken to dolphinariums. Dolphins have been exported to the United States for several parks including the well known SeaWorld parks.