The Cove

The Cove Trailer

The Cove was the winner of the Best Documentary award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It tells of a particular town in Japan which annually slaughters dolphins in barbaric ways for two reasons – primarily, the more attractive, intelligent ones will be bought for a lot of money by institutes such as Seaworld; secondly, the unwanted ones are bought by the government for meat and used as part of school dinners. Of course this caused controversy – the high levels of mercury within the dolphin meat are highly dangerous for the school children, and needless to say when the first ever dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry recounts of one dolphin committing suicide due to stress, emotions ran high among all animal lovers.

When I first saw this, it made a real impact; hell, on watching it I even cried. I signed the petition to stop this happening and did my best to spread the word via Facebook and my personal blog. This lasted for all of... a day. Of course if it ever comes up in conversation now, I can’t recommend the documentary enough, but it got me thinking: Am I really any better than those Japanese ‘farmers’?

I’ve spent the last four years of my life as a student and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you it meant living on as little cost as possible. I’d go to the supermarket, arrive at the meat aisle and survey my options: Free-range organic chicken, or the supermarket’s own minimal-packaging battery-farmed chicken that you try and avoid thinking about. When the price difference is so massive, I’m ashamed to say I went for the cheap option, every time. And now I’ve graduated, as a proud owner of a colossal student debt, the situation hasn’t changed, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future.

So I might look at these farmers and demonise them for their methods, but at the time I didn’t consider that they are undoubtedly piss poor and just trying to earn any money they can to survive. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t approve in any way of what they do, but I don’t think I exactly have the moral high ground in telling them to stop.

"The-Not-So-Silent-Observer"