Mention a dolphin to someone in the United States and they'll think about a trip to Sea World, maybe, or Flipper, the dolphin that was the star of the mid-1960s TV show. Talk about a dolphin in rural Japan and some people think of supper.Fishermen hunt dolphins about every day in Taiji, a town of about 3,000 in southwestern Japan that juts into the Pacific Ocean. The sounds of waves crashing onto a rocky shore mingle in Taiji with the screeching wails of dolphins being chopped and hacked to death by fishermen.
Locals know they offend Western sensibilities by eating dolphins, but they say it's a tradition hundreds of years old. And they say outsiders have no more right to tell them to stop eating dolphins than they would have to demand that Westerners stop slaughtering chickens or cows.
"I know there are many different ways of thinking in different societies, but for us who've been eating this for a long time ... it's an awkward thing to be criticized for," says Kayoko Tanaka, a retired middle school teacher. "I either fry dolphin meat or turn it into a stew."
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