The Japan Times has an interesting article up about Japan’s annual dolphin hunts and the possibility of dangerous levels of mercury in dolphin meat. Here’s an excerpt:

Asked about this year’s dolphin cull, an official at the Taiji Fishery Cooperative Union declined comment. The government maintains that for most of the population, the risk is low if dolphin meat is eaten in moderation.

The health ministry said that a 1995-2004 nationwide study on daily intake of methyl mercury showed the levels were safe, even for pregnant women, who are at risk of having children with birth defects if they ingest too much mercury.

However, last November, the health ministry’s Pharmaceutical Affairs and Food Sanitation Council issued a statement saying it recognized study results showing that some fetuses’ auditory responses were delayed in pregnant women who ingested mercury, and urged them to limit the dolphin meat in their diet, giving maximums for the different species. In the case of bottlenose, it is 10 grams per week.

Health concerns are not the only problem the Taiji kill has. The annual event has attracted bitter criticism from animal rights activists worldwide. Demonstrations against the hunt were held in 28 countries in late September.

At one hunting site last week in Taiji, activists watched as boats pursued several pods of bottlenose dolphins, slowly moving their crafts closer together, while crewmen banged poles against their boats to confuse the encircled dolphins.

Once herded into a holding cove and closed in with large nets, the dolphins swam in circles to protect the females and any young able to keep up. The young separated from the group were left to die of starvation or to be eaten by sharks.

The animals were left for one night in the cove so the stress-related hormones leave their bodies, making their meat more tender, and skiffs and longboats arrived at daybreak and herded the dolphins into an adjacent cove. There, a few were taken out to be sold to aquariums.

Then the longboat crews began to kill the dolphins. They cut the throats of the remaining dolphins or stabbed them randomly, a method animal rights activists call barbaric. Experts, including a former hunter, have said random stabbing results in excruciating death that can take as long as six minutes.

On Saturday, 128 bottlenose dolphins and 75 pilot whales were killed, according to Ric O’Barry, a marine mammal expert with One Voice, a French-based activist group.

O’Barry, who once trained dolphins for the 1960s U.S. television series “Flipper,” was visibly upset and said so many animals were caught that some of them had to be taken straight to the killing cove because the holding cove was too small.

“This was the most barbaric slaughter I’ve seen this year,” he said.

Personally, I see no ethical problem with eating dolphin meat, or the meat of any other animal that is not threatened with extinction. The killing of the dolphins sounds pretty brutal, but it’s probably not very easy to instantly kill so many dolphins. Regardless of the ethics of hunting dolphins, it seems to be pretty stupid to eat meat that has such high mercury levels.

In a related story, there is an interesting debate occuring over at Occidentalism on the morality of eating dog meat. Is there a problem with eating Flipper or Fido?