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":109809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-109808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}