Bicol University

Graduate School

Domilen R. Rabe MAGenSciEd

THE COVE
Directed by
Louie Psihoyos

“The Cove”, a film directed by Louie Psihoyos, is a documentary that

exposes the slaughter of dolphins in Japan as dispensable and beastliness. In the
1960’s, Richard O’ Barry was the world’s leading authority on dolphin training,
working on the set of the popular television program Flipper. Day in and day out,
O’ Barry kept the dolphins working and television audiences smiling. But one
day, that all came to a tragic end. In this unusual and compelling documentary,
a group is formed to expose the secret slaughter of 23, 000 dolphins a year in
one cove in Taiji, Japan. This fishing village is famous for distributing the majority
of “show dolphins”. Lots of money is made on these sales. O’ Barry gets together
with filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and a crew of divers, tech experts, cameramen,
and others in a heroic attempt to catch on video the actual slaughter of the
dolphins.

The Cove also reveals other guilty parties in this astonishing cover-up. They
include this International Whaling Commission, which enables the dolphin
massacres to happen, and the Japanese government, which not only looks the
other way when the subject comes up but goes along when dolphin meat is
sold on the market as “whale”. This despite the fact that scientists have proven
that dolphin meat is filled with mercury which is hazardous in large quantities.
When Japanese interviewed on the street and asked about eating dolphin
meat, they are shocked at the idea. Also, the dolphin meat is being peddled to
school lunch programs.

I hadn’t heard of this documentary until I watched this in my subject in

Selected Topics in Biology. I was very surprised by how The Cove turned out. I
thought it was incredibly well made and it was not at all what I was expecting.
Albeit this slaughter is happening in an entirely different country, watching this
film made me feel as if it could happening here. A few things about the
documentary stood out to me. The most emotional part of the film, for me, the
scene in which one dolphin had escaped the nets and was coming toward
shore, after being harpooned. It made so upsetting was not just emotional
element of an animal struggling to live, but the fact that the Japanese
fisherman were laughing, blithe, directly after the filmmakers had witnessed this
dolphin’s horrible end. It really made me realize who these fisherman truly are, at
their core.

After the documentary concluded I felt lingering sense of hope, but I

immediately wondered what the last four years had shown as a result of this film.
It has certainly raised an enormous public outcry, but evidently not enough to
stop slaughter from happening.