Al Jazeera English report about porpoise hunt in Japan
Charlie Angela of Al Jazeera files a highly misleading report about how a species of porpoise “may become endangered” because it is being hunted by fishermen in Iwate prefecture:
If the reporter had bothered to go beyond the press release handed to her by animal rights activists and actually checked IUCN data from 2008 she would have found that the species is nowhere near close to endangered:
The species is widespread and abundant, with current range-wide population estimates of more than one million animals. The species was killed in high-seas driftnet fisheries operations during the 1970s and 1980s, but these fisheries have now been banned, and by-catch levels were not considered sufficiently high to cause population declines. While incidental and directed takes in Japanese coastal waters as well as incidental takes in Russian waters are ongoing (with combined removals on the order of 20,000 annually), neither threat is likely to have caused a range-wide decline sufficient to warrant listing in a category of threat.
The information about unhealthy levels of mercury in the meat may indeed be true, but coupling it with exaggerations about the status of the species in question does not help their case.
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