Hippies, Mermaids, And Dolphins: CULLLLLLLT!!!

"The Cove unwittingly shines a light on what lies behind today’s cult of the dolphin: a discomfort with humanity itself and with the gains of modernity. Dolphins are the favoured beast of the animal rights lobby because they are presumed to be as intelligent as human beings, possibly even more intelligent says one contributor to the film. They are more spiritual, at peace and caring than we human beings (well, not hippy human beings, but the other kind, over there). As one of the many, many recent books on the wonders of ‘dolphin culture’ argues: ‘While we humans have devoted our creativity to the technological achievements possible when one has chosen thumb over flipper, they [dolphins] have devoted their vast intelligence to the realms of the heart: community, pleasure, play, touch.’

It is this that motivates the animal-rights people who made The Cove: an estrangement from humanity; a belief that we have corrupted ourselves and our souls and our capacity to deal with the ‘realms of the heart’ through our soulless modernisation of society. Like a crazy updated version of the mermaid myth, they see in dolphins the ‘lost ideals’ of the simple life they would like human beings still to be living. So the contrast in The Cove is not a terribly crude one between civilised white people and uncivilised yellow people, but rather is between feeling, emotionally intelligent dolphins (and their human champions) and overly-modern, too-speedy, light-flickering Japan. Dolphins play the role of the simple life; Japan is set up as the bad guy of modernity. The truth however is that those supposedly weird fishermen in Taiji do not stab and chop up dolphins for fun – they do it to make food, to make things, to make a living, to provide for their families. There is infinitely more humanity in their slaughter of the dolphins than there is in a film which depicts a species of animal as being superior to a nation of human beings."

-- Brendan O’Neill, disgusted at how far afield contemporary thinking can go - "They are more spiritual, at peace and caring than we" - he can't help but belch it up for Spiked!