Japanese fishermen begin annual slaughter of hundreds of dolphins

Cull of 250 animals goes ahead in defiance of worldwide outrage, US ambassador and Yoko Ono

Fishermen in Japan began slaughtering hundreds of bottlenose dolphinsearly on Tuesday morning, campaigners said, despite mounting international calls for the animals to be spared.

Members of the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd who are monitoring the annual cull in Taiji, on Japan’s Pacific coast, said local fishermen had started killing an estimated 250 dolphins just before 7.30am.

The animals were last week corralled in a cove in the town, which drew international attention in 2009 with the release of the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove.

"These dolphins are wrangled and wrestled into the killing cove, where they've sustained multiple injuries. Dolphin killers deliberately run over the pod with skiffs, they wrestle them, man-handled them into captive nets before even being slaughtered," Melissa Sehgal, a Sea Shepherd activist, told Reuters.

The methods used to capture and kill the dolphins have attracted widespread condemnation. Fishermen bang metal poles together beneath the water to confuse the animals’ hypersensitive sonar before herding them into shallow water, where they are left for up to several days before being taken to the cove to be slaughtered.

Hidden from view beneath tarpaulin covers, the fishermen drive metal rods into the dolphins’ spinal cords and leave them to die. "It takes up to 20 to 30 minutes for these dolphins to die, where they bleed out, suffocate or drown in the process of being dragged to the butcher house," Sehgal said.

They are then taken by boat to a quayside warehouse to be cut up into slabs of meat.

Here comes the best part: Even though these dolphins are killed for their meat but there's one little problem.

The rest are being slaughtered for their meat, a delicacy that most Japanese shun but which still forms part of the diet in Taiji and other whaling towns.