Whale and Dolphin Meat: Unsafe Why Should That Matter When There's Profit To Be Made

Most Japanese eat nether whale or dolphin yet the government and the fishing continue to insist it has a significant  place in Japanese culture so these products are heavily promoted.  Now it turns out they're unsafe to eat.

 Samples tested by Environmental Investigation Agency contained mercury levels up to 47 times higher than recommended safe level

Whale and dolphin meat sold by a large Japanese online retailer contain levels of mercury up to 47 times higher than the government’s recommended safe level, according to a study by the Environmental Investigation Agency.
The UK-based EIA said every one of the 20 samples it tested contained unsafe levels of mercury and called on the retailer to withdraw them immediately. The agency bought 13 of the samples from Yahoo! Japan and the remainder from Japanese supermarkets.
Yahoo! Japan is the only major online retailer in the country that continues to sell cetacean products. Rakuten, Japan’s biggest online retailer, stopped selling whale and dolphin meat after the international court of justice ordered Japan last April to immediately halt its annual whale hunts in the southern ocean.
Rakuten’s move came soon after independent experts in Japan, on behalf of the EIA, exposed the e-commerce company as the world’s biggest online retailer of elephant ivory and whale meat.

Our analysis of cetacean products on sale in Japan has shown them to be riddled with mercury and other pollutants

Clare Perry, EIA

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.