The title of this post should come as no surprise to you, if you've read any of my previous posts about cooking (like
this one).
What may surprise you, however, is that I don't dislike animals.
Shut up, all my friends who have heard me talk about kicking puppies. I'll have you know that I watched the documentary
The Cove (2009) the other night and found myself feeling guilty about the salmon rice bowl I had eaten earlier that day.
But to be honest, I had a total knee-jerk reaction to
The Cove. And the reaction jerked my knee so much that I couldn't stop talking about it at a friend that I met up with the next day, who was tired of me talking about it by the end of the day but said to me, "It's OK, I'm just ignoring you".
The Cove tells us some unfortunate things. Apparently in the Japanese town where the film was shot, people kill 23,000 dolphins every year and capture a bunch more to sell to aquatic parks. The Deputy of Fisheries in Japan that was interviewed in the film talked about how great it was that the "time to death" for dolphins had been shortened through improvements in the killing tools. We also learn that a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is like a bad high school Model UN session.
It's true that in my house I don't cook meat. But I
do eat meat, and if someone took me to Phil's BBQ, I certainly wouldn't complain. And when it comes down to it, I don't think that killing a cow or a pig is any less bad than killing a dolphin or a whale. I don't buy the argument that dolphins are intelligent, and therefore it's bad to kill dolphins but OK to kill chickens.
But again...
I eat meat. So what right do I have to be talking?
I'm sure that the entire cast and crew of
The Cove is vegan. I'm sure they don't eat fish, wear leather, or put honey on their sopapillas. I'm sure they love dolphins very much, and they would risk pissing off a bunch of Japanese people to save them.
But what was strange to me was that, the woman who was crying in the film about the killing of baby dolphins didn't seem like she would cry about the death of young men of color who are being shot and killed by police in her own country.
What was also strange was that, despite their earnestness in getting these Japanese people to stop killing dolphins, the crew had no intention of meeting them halfway. The crew, in particular Ric O'Barry, seemed to make little effort to learn Japanese (except for their occasional "
doumo arigatou"); and they certainly didn't make an effort to understand the practices of the community they were in conversation with, much less try to understand them from a place of respect.
There was also an unsurprising amount of exoticization—of the town, of the people being shot on camera, of the lodging they were staying at, of the killing practice itself. You name it, it was probably exoticized. The crew complained about the bureaucracy and the amount of paperwork required to do
anything, but if they cared to learn anything about Japan, they'd know that bureaucracy was
everywhere, not just in the case of hiding a practice of dolphin massacre. And according to them, the Japanese police wake up their prisoners and torture them in the middle of the night, in order to get the confession they want—which is totally unlike U.S. police practice of shooting people or calling them racial slurs. Apparently it was ingenious of Ric O'Barry to lie through his teeth about what he was doing in the town, because, you know, capturing the "truth".
I didn't realize that disrespect and lying were necessary tools of being an activist. I didn't realize that the practices of a town could be generalized to an entire nation, while at the same time, the complicity of the rest of the world that comes to buy meat at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo could be completely ignored. And the problem, apparently, lies solely with the Japanese people who capture and kill dolphins, not the people who (in and outside of Japan) buy the animals and their flesh.
The film points out how, in the aquatic park in this Japanese town, whale meat is sold at the stand near the area where they have whale and dolphin shows (though I'm pretty sure they sell hamburgers in zoos in the States, even if they aren't things like lion hamburgers or giraffe hamburgers). I'd feel a lot more moved by this revelation if I didn't have a sinking feeling that the people in the film also had their occasional tuna sandwiches. I would never say that humans magically had the right to kill and eat animals—
but they do kill and eat them. In the film the crew takes to the streets of a Japanese metropolis and asks its denizens if they knew that dolphins were being killed in Japan for their meat. None of them do, of course—and one woman, like the others, says, "Oh my, that's horrible." But then—I got this feeling: the woman seemed to want to ask where she could get her hands on some of that meat. But she just didn't want to say it.
The Cove indicates in its conclusion that a couple of Japanese people who were featured in interviews or scenes were removed from their posts—the aforementioned Deputy of Fisheries and the annoying Mr. Private Space that kept telling the film crew to leave the area. But this is reported as some kind of a "success"—even though it's just a way to ruin people's lives by depriving them of a livelihood (however questionable it may be). Playing heroic World Police, are we?
The film showed the Japan rep to the IWC "buying out" reps from the Eastern Caribbean islands, in order to get them to vote in ways that favor Japanese practices. Atherton Martin, a former IWC Representative of Dominica, described the situation in a way that resonated with my knee-jerk reaction: Japan's actions weren't about economics or politics, but rather about the "remnants of a traditional notion of empire"—Japan doesn't need to be told what to do, certainly not by the United States or any other Western country. And it's a good thing people there eat animal flesh, too, because it just keeps the cycle going.
Yes, tell everyone in the world to stop eating fish. Tell them to stop eating all types of meat! Tell them to stop destroying the planet by their unsustainable ways of living. Tell aquatic parks and zoos to stop putting animals in unnatural cages and close the hell down. It's better to try it than not. But I also don't think the effort will be successful, not the way
The Cove does it.
[The image is from
a review (?) on Gigazine of a location of Ōshō (of gyōza fame) that serves both potstickers AND sushi. What. (But mmmm look at those delicious salmon eggs...)]
[[I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on the
Get Some Scars EP by
Lux Lisbon that I got my hands on back in April...but I've been slacking. As a preview of that coming post, I shall just say: I like it, albeit unexpectedly! (And I can explain...!!)]]
