(Not) Leaving #Taiji

It is now 72 hours since I left Taiji, the first 30 of which were travel from Japan back to Scotland via France and Wales. I found it both interesting and very pleasing to note that 4 nations is still not as internationally diverse as an average Cove Guardian group.

In the just over a day since I got "back," I've been home, I've been to work, I've met some friends and I've even been to a funeral though thankfully as a work duty rather than through any personal connection. It should have felt like a slightly busier "normal" day. It didn't. It felt like I had abandoned the most important task of my life so far. It felt like unfinished business. It felt bad.

Watching Taiji Dolphin Defense on Livestream TV has not helped as there have been 3 hunts since we left, one where all the dolphins escaped, one where a mother and 2 babies were captured and one which is happening as I type this.

Those hunts and the dreadful aftermath will be future blog material for sure but they are just too raw to write about tonight.

There are three tasks facing me now:

Firstly making sense of the last month most of which was spent in Taiji. There have been some incredible high points, there have been too many desperately low points.

Secondly, I need to develop and implement a plan to engage with individuals, agencies and corporations who will be motivated both to ensure the best interests of Japan and to end the dolphin killings and captures in Taiji. Those dolphin killings and captures in Taiji clearly do not serve the best interests of Japan. If you are reading this blog and think you can help with that then please contact me via my Google+ page.

Finally I need to work out I can get back out there to continue this "unfinished business" and make sure that Cove Guardian is not just a nice slogan on a t-shirt, it is who I am.

Cove Guardians Anna Oliver and Nicole McLachlan

Perhaps I should have said 3 tasks facing us and used "we" instead of "I" for those 3 tasks because I have no doubt that my best friend and fellow Cove Guardian, Anna, will be as instrumental in helping to bring all this to fruition as she was amazing defending dolphins in Taiji over Christmas and New year. One thing that did make sense from the minute we got involved with this campaign was the need for mutual support on every step of the journey.

The emotions triggered by the experience of Taiji are so very strong and the impact so very personal though that I will keep my blog mostly about my impressions for the time being. Having said that, if my experiences have inspired you to get involved then you should recognise that the Cove Guardians are a growing and strengthening "we" and so there is no reason why you cannot also become a member of that amazing team of ocean champions. Cove Guardians come from every corner of the globe including Japan, could you be the first from your part of the World as Anna and myself were from ours?

In today's blog I am going to try and make some kind of sense of my initial thoughts regarding my Taiji experience, a starter for ten if you will because I do not think there are enough words to describe the full experience in a single attempt. Proof reading this I realise I have not managed it at all, it's going to take a long time to exorcise these demons if it can even be done.

I arrived thinking that the "story" was of some poor, impoverished fishermen claiming tradition as an excuse to murder what they reputedly describe as "big fish" with the occasional bonus of a live dolphin being sold to a dolphinarium generating a welcome cash windfall.

The truth was the exact opposite.

The Taiji dolphin drive hunt is an extremely well organised and ruthless, profit-driven and demand-led, live capture business with those dolphins not deemed worthy of being sold into captivity being butchered to squeeze every last penny out of that day's evil activities with no thought whatsoever to the morality of those actions.

The evil men who lead this programme are amongst the wealthiest individuals in this part of Wakayama whilst most of the rest of the town has an obvious and significantly lower standard of living than is generally evident throughout the rest of the prefecture.

This raptor is flying wild and free above the Dolphin Base
sea pens where live dolphins are held prisoner and forced
to turn tricks for spoilt tourists

Ignoring the poverty and ignoring the dolphin captures and slaughters (although it really is an impossible thing to do) we would have to view Taiji as a small, traditional fishing village with very impressive eco-tourism potential, not just from marine eco-tourism but also from the diversity of birds and land wildlife in the area.

The wildlife is amazing whilst the scenery is spectacular and, to me as a businessman, the ethical commercial opportunities are as obvious as it is staggering to see them being ignored.

As the fishermen of Taiji seem hell-bent on hunting dolphins to extinction whilst also wiping out every other species of fish in the surrounding oceans the end seems as inevitable as the end already experienced by countless similar traditional fishing villages the World over.

I spent my teenage years living and working on west coast fishing boats during the late 1970s and early 1980s at a time when we (Scotland) were fighting Iceland, Faroes and Norway over who had the most "right" to fish cod to extinction.

Juvenile hammerhead shark landed at Taiji butcherhouse

Of course we didn't know that is what we were doing then but it is now so very hard to understand why those same nations, my own included, are repeating exactly the same arguments and behaviours in the 2010s over mackerel.

I suspect if I had not escaped that lifestyle that I would still be on the boats, still too blind to see what should be plain to all but I have escaped and I now know the issues so there is at the very least a moral obligation on me to face those issues and do what I can about them. 

If I was still on the boats I also have no doubt that I would be amongst the poor fishermen wondering how a very few of our community had managed to get so rich whilst the rest of us just got poorer and more and more tied up with regulations. I would almost certainly have been trapped in the "us against the World" mentality that seems to be gaining the Taiji dolphin exploiters support which they absolutely do not deserve from their harbour neighbours.

Governments say it is all about jobs but it has seemed to me for some time that a combination of licensing more and more super-trawlers whilst also issuing licences to murder marine megafauna (cetaceans in Japan, pinnipeds in Scotland) to solve the problem of coastal community employment  is the marine equivalent of fighting a house fire with gasoline and that is what I spend most of my time lecturing about to anyone who will listen.

More wildlife at Dolphin Base, Taiji

In any case, it is clear that tourism - especially wildlife tourism - is the really easy, minimum investment solution to coastal community employment but it does require an element of "cleaning up your act" before it can be most heavily promoted.

That may explain why it is the most overlooked potential net contributor to GDP for my country, or at least the most under-recorded, or possibly it is simply because it is too hard for a politician to take credit for stuff that existed before the politicians started interfering with it to begin with.

I cannot help reflecting that in Scotland our Police would prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who harmed a dolphin or pilot whale or any other wildlife, marine or land - although admittedly not licensed seal killers, see this blog for more info CLICK. They would prosecute both deliberate and accidental harm and that is only right and proper. In Taiji, the Police are obliged to protect those whose deliberate intent is to harm these magnificent animals both by lethal injury and by enslavement with all the subsequent harm which goes with that.

I thought that I was fully prepared for the experience of actually being a Cove Guardian but I now know that nothing prepares you for Taiji, there is always going to be a surprise around the corner. One pleasant surprise has been the warmth and pleasantness of the Japanese people we have encountered and I have no doubt that as more and more Japanese nationals become aware of what is going on in this village of hell that we are approaching the start of a credible solution for this solvable problem. I will explore that much more fully in a day or two when I am in a calm place and able to focus on the positive. For now, please accept that there is a lot of positive and it does give great hope for the future.

For now, thank you for reading.

101 Damnations

This is my first post as a Sea Shepherd Cove Guardian, having been in Taiji, Japan for just over 24 hours, partnering my very best friend Anna as a team from Scotland in support of this most important campaign.

It has been one of the most emotional full days of my life so far, and I do mean full!.

I had to laugh when I logged onto Facebook this evening and it asked me to review what it thought were "my" top 20 highlights of 2012. There can be little doubt after today's events that my top 20 most memorable events of 2012 will now happen during the next 2 weeks.

No one comes to Taiji under any illusion that it will be a holiday and that was particularly true for Anna and myself having had the benefit of first class briefings on what was happening and what to expect during the first day or so. We also had the benefit of excellent reporting on the Cove Guardians' Facebook Page and knew that in the few days before our arrival somewhere in the region of 200 bottlenose dolphins (the "Flipper" dolphins most prized by the captive facilities) had been hunted and driven into the Cove to await an uncertain fate.

We were told that dolphins netted into the Cove means we should expect one of 3 things: either capture and processing into a life of captivity performing tricks for the entertainment of the unaware, or, just as bad, slaughter to turn beautiful life into unwanted meat or, hope against hope, we might see them being released back into the wild from which they were stolen in the first place.

Today we experience all 3 and I am feeling completely wrung out.

Let me pause for a moment and tell you our experience of the Japanese people since arriving in Osaka and travelling South to Wakayama Prefecture - most famous for the Nachi Waterfall at Kii-Katsuura, a ten minute drive from where we are staying during our sojourn in this part of the World.

I only mention that because people seem to know all about the waterfall and lots of people have recommended that we visit it but nobody knows about Taiji and they find it hard to believe when we tell them.

Regarding the Japanese, we had been told to expect hostility from the outset. We had been told that, "[They] are cruel and callous."  We had been told that they hated foreigners. We had been told that they especially hated Sea Shepherd. None of this came from Sea Shepherd sources of course and I am not surprised because none of it was true.

Without exception we have been met with friendly smiles, pleasantries and courtesy of the sort that makes you feel so uncomfortable because you know you have never been as gracious to perfect strangers as the grace and dignity being offered to you. We have received gifts twice already as random acts of kindness from complete strangers in a land where gift giving is imbued with the greatest significance. We have seen hard-work and effort, courage and citizenship to the highest degree. We have even had our first interview with the police by torchlight on a cold and windy dockside in the small hours of the morning and that interview ended with smiles and laughter and best wishes for the day ahead.

I love Japan and I love her people. Well, almost all of Japan and almost all of her people, there is, after all, still the issue of Taiji and the Dolphin Drive Hunts. Not tradition, just a bloody, an oh so very bloody, excuse for extreme profit from extreme disregard of the difference between right and wrong. Not a Japanese trait, not an any nation trait, just a sad and all too common trait amongst evil, selfish and greedy men the World over, in this case they just happen to be in this country where I am still just a temporary visitor.

The evil men (and women) capturing and killing dolphins in Taiji have surpassed themselves in diabolical design this week, cynically attempting to win a propaganda coup with the release back into the wild of between 80 and 100 dolphins, perhaps hoping that no-one would notice the 23 bottlenose dolphins which earlier today they slaughtered for meat.

The full tally for the last week was 25 beautiful dolphins which transferred to the butcher's slab when you add the 2 which had earlier died by horrible drowning trapped in the nets of the Cove.

Most dreadful of all though has been the total of 101 bottlenose dolphins sold into captivity.

101 Damnations

Let me go straight back to the wonderful Japanese people we have met. Kind, generous, hard-working - extremely hard working - and, like kind, generous, extremely hard-working people the world over earning just about enough to cover the bills with not a lot left over.

Contrast them with the wealth that is now plainly evident to me as I have been moving around Taiji today and consider that 101 captured and sold into slavery dolphins could represent as much as $1 million per day for each of 6 days work and that will be shared amongst just 30 or so men and women.

I will be returning to the theme of captive dolphins a lot over the next few weeks because in just 1 single day here it has become crystal clear to me that the dolphinarium industry is THE problem at Taiji, not any kind of "traditional" indigenous means of putting food on the table for an otherwise starving family. That isn't and they are not.

I also need to get my head round the dolphin trainers - men and women from all over Japan and beyond who stood by watching whilst 23 dolphins were ruthlessly, bloodily and noisily slaughtered.

Dolphin trainers who then dragged their own live prizes through the blood fouled waters to start earning a return on their investment in the marine parks which paid their expenses for this mission of evil.

I can't write about that at the moment, I am still too shocked at their calculated refusal to acknowledge any sort of moral responsibility by the very act of participation in a bloodbath such as the one we were forced to witness.

Following today's events my emotions are still all over the place but I am trying so desperately hard to bottle my anger at the theft from their families and from the wild of those 101 dolphins, temper my rage at the cold-blooded and wholly unnecessary murder of 23 dolphins from that same family, suppress my fury at the pointless and avoidable deaths of 2 more members of that dolphin family in the nets which were used to hold them all in the killing Cove and instead try to ignite the spark of comfort from the remaining 80 or so dolphins who we saw swim to freedom this afternoon.

I think that is the happy thought I would like to end this blog on today.

Thank you all for reading, thank you all for your support.

Amazing Vegans Part 1

I am very lucky to be surrounded by some of the most amazingly inspirational people all of whom, in their own way, have helped me not only in my journey from carnist to vegan but in my journey through life.

The list is long (very long, it should keep me going in blogs for years) but there are a few in particular who live large in my life at the moment and I hope to feature them all in much more detail over the next few months. For now, let me introduce a few of them briefly and finish today with a more in-depth tribute to possibly THE most amazing vegan it has ever been my privilege to know.

In my ocean conservation campaigning I am delighted to have Darren Collis of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as a close friend. Darren won the Unsung Hero Award at this year's Vegfest, Europe's largest veggie event and is seen in this picture receiving the Mahaveer Award which he won in 2007.

Darren's story is the most wonderful tale of selfless commitment to others, although those who know him will already know that "others" recognises no species distinction, we all share this planet and most of us need to become much better at sharing than we have been so far. I look forward to telling Darren's tale, not least as an example of the sort of person Paul Watson is talking about when he says that passion is what matters. Passion is important not just at sea but also onshore, doing what needs to be done to keep other equally passionate people at sea. Having (rather a lot of) ability to back the passion up is, of course, a very nice bonus.

From the world of business I am proud to be a long-time friend and associate of Martin Stepek who I hope will tell us his own story as a guest blogger in the very near future. Martin is a business lecturer, motivational speaker and expert leader in mindfulness. You may recall that I mentioned him in my blog of 2nd November, "What's important on your bucket list?" my own tribute to the memory of his father Jan.

Martin is one of the kindest, most generous people I know, not just financially, he is generous with his time, that most precious of all commodities. In this picture he is promoting Wildhearts in Action , another amazing charity which I will also be blogging about in due course (if only there were 24 days in every week and 124 hours in every day: I might be able to fit it all in!)

My third Amazing Vegan for future blogging is Anna Oliver who I have mentioned already in connection with her campaign to get to Taiji and defend dolphins and pilot whales, see link here:  ANNA'S TAIJI CAMPAIGN PAGE

Anna's tale will be easy to follow as we will both be blogging day by day from Taiji, sharing our thoughts on the horrors unfolding there and hopefully exploring the art of the possible as we consider alternatives to the wholly unnecessary murder of beautiful, sentient animals in the killing cove that place enshrines.

You don't need to go there yourself to be part of our Taiji experience - if you follow the link above and contribute to that campaign fund then you will know that you are making change possible. Our efforts are all assisted by others and in Anna's case will be directly assisted by your thoughtful donations. If you are able to donate then you will become a part of her amazing story.

None of these three people do what they do because they are vegans, however, they are all vegans for exactly the same reason as they do what they do. Specifically, they are all caring compassionate people, none of whom tolerate fools gladly but all of whom nurture, encourage, aid and assist those who wish to be better custodians of this, our planet, to do just that. All of them lead by example.

Fiona Oakes, An Amazing Vegan

Let me now introduce possibly the most inspirational individual I have ever met, the truly amazing vegan, Fiona Oakes.

Here is a quote from her bio on her public facebook page, "Fiona was the first lady to finish in the masses race of the Great North Run last year - YES FIRST !! & the Media ignored her !! She headed a team of runners for the Vegan Society, who all proudly wore their Team Vegan vests - perhaps something to do with the fact she was ignored as the media seem to love ignoring any positive vegan role models."

That quote, dear readers, is what inspired today's entire blog. Vegans are not World famous (not our fault). Nobody ever got rich - at least not in a monetary sense - by being vegan (how could we?). Nobody even got an award for achievement from outwith the vegan community by being vegan (you need to be something far more ordinary for that).

Ladies and gentlemen, if you are not (yet) vegan please do me a favour; share today's blog, help these amazing people get the recognition they deserve from beyond our small community of caring, compassionate souls.

Other info on Fiona's page describes just some of her achievenments:

Fiona holds the course record for the Essex Country Marathon Championship which she won in 2007 - her record still stands today. She is the only female runner to run under 3 hours on the course in its 17 year history.

Fiona has come top 10 in several international marathons (Florence, Moscow & Amsterdam and Nottingham) and top 20 in London & Berlin (two of the 5 Major City Marathons, the biggest races in the world)

To top it all, Fiona became the FIRST vegan runner to complete the soul-destroying, most gruelling of all marathons - billed as and acknowledged internationally to be THE toughest race on Earth - the Marathon des Sables.

The Marathon des Sables is a race distance of 154 (ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FOUR) miles across the Sahara Desert run in temperatures ranging from sub zero overnight to 130° Fahrenheit during the day. Oh, and while she competed, Fiona carried all her supplies on her back as she ran.

Both in training for this ultra-marathon and for all the other races which she still competes in, Fiona regularly runs between 80 and 100 miles a week maintaining fitness and building stamina and strength. For most of us, that would be a full-time task in itself. For the elite runners who Fiona is competing against it is a full-time job.

There is something I don't know how to fit in without testing your disbelief but I need to do it sometime so it might as well be now: at age 14 Fiona suffered a debilitating condition which left her using crutches for years, cost her one knee replacement and severely damaged the other knee. Doctors told her she would never walk properly again, never mind run. She understates things but you need to know that she has already accomplished a miracle and - as she cannot run without pain - continues to achieve miracles every single day.

I describe Fiona as THE most amazing vegan though because as well as the physical challenges which she has had to overcome and as well as doing all of that fitness training, competing and WINNING to prove that you can do it as a vegan if you give it all as a vegan she also cares personally for every single animal at the animal welfare sanctuary which she runs, Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary.

Tower Hill is not a small affair. Every single morning Fiona's alarm rings at 0330 and before she can even think about that day's training she feeds, cleans, mucks-out and otherwise cares for over 400 animals all of whom depend on her - and now also on you.

I do hope you will all click on THIS LINK and spend time on Fiona's charity web site. Please read about what an amazing thing she is achieving at Tower Hill and please, please, please find it in your heart to donate to help her. If you do nothing other than buy a calendar, you will still be helping but I hope those of you who can afford to will do a whole lot more.

The first time I heard about Fiona was as a brand new vegan seeking help from The Vegan Society who sent me the DVD, Making The Connection. This is Fiona's part in that video and I will let her add significantly to today's blog by letting her continue this part of the story herself;

Not so very long ago I was a bit of a runner and long distance walker but in the last few years before I became vegan I had become flabby, lethargic, unmotivated and always just enough "under-the-weather" to talk myself out of exercise. Generally speaking I was fairly typical of my demographic.

Vegan - done properly - changes you, it changes you for the better. How could it not? Eating healthily as a vegan is about as close as it's possible to get to the nutritional balance our bodies were designed for and it isn't lost on me that the World's top athletes are trending more and more towards a purely vegan diet. The sports nutritionists may not call it that, of course, but if your diet contains plant-based nutrition only then it is vegan regardless of what your own sense of identity has you believing.

After I had seen that video, I asked for an introduction to Fiona and asked her for some advice on getting back into running. I had no idea just how huge Tower Hill was at that point or how full on Fiona's life was. Looking back I am a bit embarrassed to have been even just a wee bit demanding of her time but, true to type, Fiona was as generous with her time (insanely, unselfishly generous) as the other three vegan influencers on my life who I mentioned earlier, Darren, Anna and Martin - as well as unmentioned Rob and Chris and Amanda and Elaine and Gemma and Alex and Gary and Andy and a cast of at least tens of others if maybe not yet hundreds or even thousands. Vegans really are rather a nice bunch.

Fiona, thank you for everything you do and thank you all for reading.