SHINGU, Japan – This year’s dolphin-hunting season began Monday in the western Japan whaling town of Taiji, using the traditional “drive-hunting” method that has been labeled as cruel by animal-rights groups at home and abroad.<\/p>\n
During the hunt, fishing boats belonging to a local whaling cooperative herd dolphins and small whales into a cove in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, where they are either captured or killed.<\/p>\n
On Monday, a pod of Risso’s dolphins were spotted some 9 kilometers off the coast and 10 were driven to the cove.<\/p>\n
Each dolphin was about 3 meters long, and they will be consumed as food.<\/p>\n
“It was lucky of us to catch 10 on the first hunting day,” said Masaki Tsuchiyama, 54, the head of the local cooperative.<\/p>\n
More than 10 people, watched over by the police, protested the hunt by raising banners when the boats left the port.<\/p>\n
The hunt will continue through next spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SHINGU, Japan – This year’s dolphin-hunting season began Monday in the western Japan whaling town of Taiji, using…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,128,338],"class_list":{"0":"post-112612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}