On November 23, a symposium entitled "The Present Situation of Orcas and Plans for their Breeding" was held at Tokyo Kaiyou University.  The discussions held at this conference confirm a high possibility that Japan will again issue a permit to capture orcas through the infamous dolphin drive hunts, now carried out in Futo and Taiji.  During these hunts, dolphins and small whales are driven to shore and butchered for their meat or captured alive for the aquarium industry.

The most recent wild orca captures took place in September 2003 in Far East Russia. A group of orcas was trapped using a fishing trawler equipped with a purse seine net. During the capture a young orca became entangled in the net and drowned consequently. A single female was removed from the group and taken into captivity, but died less than one month later. Similar problems were associated with the captures of five orcas at Taiji in Japan in 1997. Only months after the capture, two of the orcas died. Two other orcas have since died (in 2000 and 2004), leaving only one survivor of the capture.

The capture of 10 orcas off Taiji in 1997 and the subsequent confinement in captivity of five of these animals was reportedly the first pod of orcas to be sighted off Taiji for several years. No accurate data exists on the population of orcas found in Japanese waters but it is likely that it has never recovered from the large-scale decimation of the hunting it has been subjected to in previous decades. Even less is known of population parameters for transient orcas, provoking fears that the 1997 capture of transients may have decimated one of the last remaining transient pods in Japanese waters.

WDCS is very concerned about these reported plans for the further live capture of orcas in Japanese waters and the impact any captures will have on the remaining populations. We oppose these proposed captures, which we believe will have dramatic effects on any orca populations targeted, based on the special biology and uncertain status of these animals in Japanese waters.

For more information, see also www.drivenbydemand.org.