Why can't you catch or eat dolphins? Will the dolphin--following on the rhinoceros, the tiger, and the bear--become the next major focus of the effort to protect wild animals in Taiwan?
Dusk. Under their leader Charles Chang, the members of the Wildlife Protection Unit of the Council of Agriculture have been hunkered down for many days in Yunlin County's Ssuhu Rural Township with local government and police officials, monitoring the activities of Wu Wan-chiao. After they familiarize themselves with his schedule and habits, they decide to act. At the moment they move he is in a ramshackle workshop, using an electric saw to cut off dolphins' heads, after which he chops up the meat. When he is caught in the act, there are still seven entire dolphins he has not yet had time to process. The authorities then open up his storage freezer, only to find that there is such a large stockpile that it takes a long time just to calculate the amount.
Who is this "butcher"? As Chen Juei-yung, in charge of wildlife conservation affairs for the Yunlin County Bureau of Agriculture, says, Wu is "a simple man."
Based on records of transactions, Charles Chang judges that Wu was a major middleman in the dolphin meat trade, buying from fishermen for resale to seafood restaurants in Yunlin and Chiayi, on Taiwan's west coast. Will the dolphin, like the shark and the bear, be another sacrifice in the quest for culinary delicacies by people in Taiwan?
The dauphin and the lazy daughter-in-law
In the West, dolphins are seen as friendly and intelligent animals. There are many tales of dolphins rescuing drowning people or helping fishermen. The hunter Orion made his way into the heavens riding a dolphin. In ancient Greece, killing a dolphin was held to be as serious an offense as killing a man. And in the French royal court, the heir to the throne was honored with the name "Dauphin" (dolphin).
In the Orient, in ancient records, the early Chinese personified the dolphin, depicting it as a lively creature. Moreover, these records clearly state that dolphin meat is not suitable for eating. In a Chinese tale, a man named Bo Ya is playing the zither, hoping in vain for an appreciative audience, until a dolphin comes along who hears and understands his music. Also, dolphins were said to appear to warn people of impending disaster.
According to another legend, reported in the Shu Yi Ji (Records of the Strange), the dolphin is the transformation of a woman, surnamed Yang, who was drowned by her mother-in-law. Thus it also carries the name "lazy daughter-in-law fish." Perhaps the dolphin's large amount of body fat is reminiscent of a daughter-in-law who is not hard-working enough! Because Chinese found dolphin fat "repellent," they said that only "barbarians" would eat dolphin. Chinese only used the dolphin to get oil for lamps or for mixing with lime to repair boats.
So why do people in Taiwan today eat something their ancestors didn't think of as edible? Yang Hong-chia was the earliest in post-WWII Taiwan to study cetaceans. He speculates that perhaps the first immigrants to Taiwan brought the habit of eating dolphin with them when they crossed over from Fujian 400 years ago.
People living on the Fujian coast have always relied on the sea for their livelihoods. Perhaps they began eating the dolphin because in their local area meat was scarce, and the dolphin was rich in fat and oil. Eventually eating dolphin became customary. When Yang did a survey in Yunlin in 1974, he found one fish market that specialized in selling dolphin meat.
But Yang emphasizes that "the area of dolphin consumption is very limited." In fact, it is mainly confined to Yunlin, and dolphins caught by fishermen from around Taiwan usually end up in that county. It is widely believed that dolphin meat has great "supplementary value" (as Chinese dietary theory puts it). Women who are still weak just after giving birth, or old people with cold limbs from poor circulation, are said to benefit from dolphin meat cooked up with ginger or sesame oil. Also, back in the days when not everyone could afford to eat pork, beef, or poultry, inexpensive dolphin meat was a source of protein for the poor.
However, after the promulgation of the Wildlife Conservation Law in 1990, this "traditional" demand became a commercial opportunity. Chen Juei-yung notes that before the law, one catty (0.6 kg) of dolphin meat fetched about NT$50-60 (pork going for about NT$75). But now that the trade is illegal, the price has jumped nearly ten times over, to NT$400-500 per catty. You can't buy it in most ordinary markets, and only old familiar customers at seafood restaurants are "let in on the secret."
Is 1000 a lot?
The dolphin is related to the larger toothed whales, both being part of the order Cetacea. There are 79 species within this order. The terms "dolphin" and "whale" are applied to various cetaceans depending on body size, but there is no scientific discontinuity between the species of Cetacea. Chou Lien-siang's book Guide to Cetaceans of Taiwan points out that 28 species of Cetacea, including the bottlenose dolphin, the Risso's dolphin, and the pantropical spotted dolphin, have been recorded in the waters surrounding Taiwan. Originally they were categorized as "endangered species," but have since been listed as "precious and rare species." Permission must be received from the relevant units of the United Nations in order to use them.
Are Taiwan's dolphins really so few that they are "precious and rare"? Even Chou Lien-siang, who has been studying cetaceans for more than six years, is unable to answer such questions as: How many dolphins are there around Taiwan? What are their migration routes? When do their numbers peak? These questions will require a lot of manpower, resources, and time to answer accurately.
There has never been much interest in cetacean research in Taiwan. The earliest pioneer, Yang Hung-chia, worked virtually single-handedly, without any financial support in this endeavor from the institution where he worked, the Taiwan Fisheries Research Institute (TFRI). It was only after 1990 that the fisheries department of the National Taiwan Ocean University and the zoology department at National Taiwan University began doing resource surveys, all of which are still in the early stages.
Last July, Huang Chao-chin, a graduate student at Ocean University, began going out with ships of the TFRI each month to do surveys. Thus far he has spotted 26 groups of dolphins. But there is a long way to go before he reaches the full 60 sightings required for an accurate statistical analysis.
Last June 19 and 20, participants in the "Third Symposium on Cetacean Ecology and Conservation" held in Taiwan surveyed the East Coast aboard the TFRI's ship Haifu. It is estimated that about 500-600 dolphins appeared in the area during the survey. However, because there are no previous figures against which to compare, the survey results "are just for reference," advises Huang.
The main reason dolphins have protected status is not because of the results of detailed research and evaluation. When you look back over the history, you can see that dolphin conservation in Taiwan has grown out of conflict and coordination among fishermen, the government, and overseas conservation groups.
The gamble of the Dragon King of the Sea
The story begins in Penghu. Hung Kuo-chiang, mayor of Peiliao Village in Huhsi Rural Township, relates that dolphins come by every year just around the lunar New Year. Riding the currents and pursuing squid and other fish, the dolphins migrate along the sea lanes between Penghu on one side and Tainan, Yunlin, and Chiayi counties on the other. Sometimes they end up following the natural sea route that the locals have come to call "punting pole road." This route, deep outside and shallow inside, passes by Yuanpei Island and terminates at the Penghu town of Shakang.
Old folks around Shakang describe the arrival of the dolphins in their area as "the covering of a gambling debt by the Dragon King of the Sea," who pays up by delivering dolphins for people to eat. Beginning in the Japanese occupation era, when Yuanpei folks saw the dolphins coming, they would signal Shakang, and everyone would take to their fishing boats. By banging their punting poles against the sides of their sampans, they could herd the dolphins--who some call "not very daring"--into the central channel. Surrounded by boats, the dolphins would be steadily forced toward the beach at Shakang.
Kuo Chin-lung is a teacher at Makung High School and also a member of the Penghu Cultural Workshop, a group preserving local history and culture. He recalls that in 1969-1970, when he was teaching at the Shakang branch of the Huhsi Middle School, he saw this spectacle with his own eyes. When the students saw the huge number of fishing boats out at sea, they rushed down to the beach, to watch and wait for the adults to force the dolphins into the tiny harbor area. "Some people even jumped right into the water and playfully rode on the backs of the dolphins."
Bringing everyone together at the Temple of the God of the Earth, the beached dolphins would be divided up. First Yuanpei was given 30% of the catch, and the rest would be distributed according to how much effort each person put in. Even little kids who just stood off to the side would get a portion. "This was a collective fishing process that helped to cement the community together," explains Kuo. Like the cooperative picking of the laver in Chikan and Huhsi, the dolphin catch was a tradition that went back 300 or 400 years.
There were reports about this "event" on Taiwan television as early as 1974. Although there was some general concern about the situation, discussion didn't last long; at that time environmental consciousness was still not very pronounced in Taiwan.
In 1990, however, the practice caused an international uproar when the Hawaii-based private conservation group Earthtrust (formerly "Save the Whales") caught the "slaughter" of dolphins by the people of Shakang on film, and got it broadcast in the US.
An international audience
It was about the same time that the well-known environmental reporter Yang Hsien-hung wrote an article in the Capitol Morning Post describing one particular incident of fishermen killing a "false killer whale."
"First the fishermen cut the dolphin's throat and inserted a steel rod into the wound [draining the blood slowly supposedly makes the meat more tender]. After putting the dolphin, still alive, aside for two or three hours, they started to use a knife to decapitate it. When the knife got to the animal's carotid artery, it began to struggle amidst an outpouring of blood. It finally managed to jump into the sea. The water turned red, and remained so for a long time."
It was not only in Taiwan that dolphin deaths at the hands of fishermen began to get serious attention. That same year, Dr. W.F. Perrin, an American marine mammal scholar, gave testimony to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) on this issue. He described for the first time the severity of the problem of small-scale cetaceans being deliberately caught or dying after being accidentally trapped in fishing nets.
The IWC was originally formed in 1946 by whaling nations in order to distribute the resources for the whaling industry. Because no one in the industry specifically aims to catch dolphins, little attention has been given to small cetaceans of low economic value (with the exception of controlling the numbers of the northern bottlenose whale).
Yet, one might ask, why should people object to dolphins being caught any more than other forms of sea life? People first began to understand dolphins--and to think them especially worth treasuring--with the development of dolphin research in the 1960s. Comparisons of the brains of dolphins, monkeys, man, and other mammals showed that dolphins had even more folds in their cerebral cortexes than humans, suggesting that dolphins are highly intelligent. Also, research conducted over a 15-year period at the University of Hawaii confirmed that dolphins have high-level language recognition abilities, and may have a grammar structure including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and direct and indirect objects.
Fish thieves
Despite growing sympathy for dolphins since those days, it was only rather late that they attracted the attention of conservation organizations, and dolphins now face many threats. In a 1991 publication on cetaceans, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources listed the main threats to dolphins as being commercial takes, destruction of their habitats, pollution, and incidental takes.
Deliberate hunting of dolphins is not limited to Taiwan. According to the Fall 1993 issue of Earthtrust's Earth Journal, people working the fishing grounds off Japan, Peru, Sri Lanka, Denmark, and Chile all provide dolphins for human consumption, or use them for bait to catch sharks or crabs. Fishermen, who see the dolphins as competitors, even scorn them as "fish thieves." Says Dr. Chou, "You can see the conflicts between the interests of the fishing industry and those of the dolphin most starkly in major fishing grounds worldwide."
But direct hunting has always been limited to certain regions. An even greater threat to dolphin numbers has been incidental death, which is especially serious in the tuna industry.
The two main tuna fishing industries that have posed the greatest threats to dolphins are encirclement net fishing off the United States and Latin America, and driftnet fishing in the North Pacific.
In the former, dolphins are easily accidentally caught in encirclement nets because of their habit of showing up above the tuna. In the latter, many dolphins have been drowned after being accidentally entangled in driftnets.
Although there were no figures to prove that these deaths threatened to make dolphins extinct, there developed a broad sense internationally that they should be protected. In 1990, under pressure from environmental groups, the largest seafood processing companies in the US agreed not to purchase tuna that was caught in ways causing unnecessary dolphin deaths. They labeled their new products "Dolphin Safe," in an effort to win consumer support. These steps were a major blow to the tuna fishing industries in Mexico and Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea--lambasted by environmentalists--finally agreed at the end of 1992 to ban driftnet fishing on the high seas in order to reduce accidental deaths of all sea creatures (including dolphins) and seabirds.
Thirty dead per year?
Given these trends, the 1990 Shakang incident described above--involving people who are normally coastal fishermen and thus were unaware of the intensity of the international conservation trends--was explosive. Although the Council of Agriculture reacted immediately to follow up the incident and the same year placed the dolphin under the protection of the Wildlife Conservation Law, the dolphins of Shakang had already become a cause celebre.
In 1993, when the dolphins again swam past Penghu, locals herded about 30 into the harbor, though this time they fed them and kept them alive in hopes of making them a tourist attraction. They even established a management committee. Later, they insisted on keeping two of the dolphins, a violation for which all the members of the committee were found guilty of criminal offenses. Sadly, it is clear the local residents lack specialized knowledge of how to care for dolphins. Of seven dolphins retained after the 1990 incident, only two are still alive; and only one of the five or six calves produced by those dolphins taken in 1990 survives.
Chou Lien-siang has tried many times to discuss alternatives with the citizens of Shakang. Ocean Park of Hong Kong is willing to teach them techniques for the care and feeding of dolphins free of charge. But the locals have been cool to any such offers. "We are looking after them as best as we can," says old Mr. Ou, in charge of the dolphins. The key to the problem is that the residents still see the dolphins as they see all fish--as living property to be exploited.
Shakang has already applied several times through the county government to the COA for permission to catch 30 dolphins a year to replace the old dolphins as part of a tourism plan. But the request has always been rejected because the number of dolphins in the wild has not yet been ascertained.
Chou Lien-siang says that it is too early to discuss any such plan to take dolphins into captivity. Of course, personally she doesn't approve of the idea, wondering, "Does it mean that 30 dolphins will die each year?"
Put on the brakes?
Now that the dolphin is a focus of international concern, and Taiwan has been through a tough process of improving animal protection, there has been intense interest in this latest incident involving confiscation of dolphin meat. International bodies like the Environmental Investigation Agency, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and the Oceania Project have all contacted Dr. Chou through the Internet for more information.
Thus far most of them see the incident as a successful result of the implementation of Taiwan's conservation laws. As Marcus J. Phipps, representative of TRAFFIC (East Asia-Taipei), says, "it is purely a legal problem." Taiwan already has laws on the book to protect these animals, and he can see no need for international environmentalists to become involved.
Nevertheless, there are those in Taipei, all too familiar with the politics of international conservation organizations, who have broken out in a cold sweat. They know that April approaches, and with it the United States' "report card" on Taiwan's environmental protection efforts over the past year, based on which the US will reconsider whether or not to take Taiwan off the Pelly Amendment watch list. At this sensitive time, will this "dolphin incident" have a negative impact on Taiwan's international image?
Members of the Wildlife Protection Unit say that they have no choice but to enforce the law. Though any new cases might give rise to negative claims like "Taiwan is still hunting and killing dolphins," they will also demonstrate the government's vigor in implementing the law. As Charles Chang stresses, his unit will fully investigate any and all future indications that the conservation law is being violated. Otherwise, "if we knew about a case and did nothing, wouldn't that just be the same thing as the police burying a crime?"
Grateful dolphins
In any case, because of educational efforts by the Wildlife Protection Unit and local city and county governments, and because memories of the stiff punishments meted out three years ago to people in Shakang are still fresh in people's minds, there is already a broad consensus that "dolphins are not to be caught." In the last year, there have been four incidents of cetaceans being beached in four very disparate parts of Taiwan, and in all four incidents local governments, military units, and citizens rushed to the rescue. According to a November 1, 1995 report in the China Times, after a dolphin was rescued at Yung-an, Taoyuan County, "it happily leaped out of the sea several times, and occasionally nodded its head up and down, seeming to express its gratitude."
Because of the frequency of such incidents, Dr. Chou wrote a special newspaper article instructing people how to deal with beached cetaceans, so that the public at large could become more educated in specialized rescue techniques.
Yet the comprehensive ban addresses only the symptoms (the capture of dolphins), but does not get to the root of the problem (a full understanding of dolphins and their numbers). Indeed, in one respect, the law has created a problem for dolphin researchers.
Given the fact that, as Dr. Chou notes, "as long as the fishing industry exists, the incidental take will never reach reach zero," two years ago, commissioned by the COA, she began acquiring samples of dead dolphins from beachings and incidental takes to study for future reference in managing Taiwan's cetacean resources.
These samples have proved helpful in establishing basic biological data on local cetaceans. "Such data includes life histories, community structures, and eating habits. From life histories and community structures we can tell whether cetaceans are being put under pressure from overdevelopment, and adopt countermeasures. From eating habits we can get to the bottom of the question of just how much conflict there really is between fishermen and dolphins," wrote Chou in her final report to the COA.
But fishermen are hesitant to report and deliver beached or incidentally taken dolphins. Thus, though this should be the peak season for such reports, there has been silence, notably from Penghu.
Caught in a legal net
Penghu people still use driftnets in coastal waters to catch fish, so they must have some incidental cetacean catches. So why don't they report these? After a visit to the islands, Yang Shih-chu, one of Dr. Chou's research assistants in the Department of Zoology at NTU, says that the fishermen want to cooperate, but they are "afraid of getting involved." They don't want to have to go through a dockside investigation and do all the follow-up procedures. If they can't prove the catch was accidental, they might even face prosecution. So why should they go through the effort of bringing a dolphin all the way back to harbor?
Village mayor Hung Kuo-chiang, also a ship's captain, on one occasion last year heard about an incidental dolphin take over the wireless, and immediately notified the NTU zoology department to send someone to pick up the specimen. When the dolphin was brought back to the dock, he says, "a lot of people circled around to gawk. The local police were told by several people, 'There is someone out there killing a dolphin.'"
Thus far this year there have been no reports at all. Hung asked around unofficially, and found out that everyone is afraid of trouble, so if they kill a dolphin by mistake they just throw it straight back into the ocean.
Chou Lien-siang also paid a visit to Penghu to ask local officials to encourage fishermen to bring samples back. She hoped to reduce the psychological obstacles for them and establish a collection network.
Unfortunately, posters produced by the COA this February say: "If any protected wild animal is accidentally caught, it must be immediately returned to the sea, dead or alive." This means that dead dolphins will return to nature, and injured ones have a chance to live. But this will make it that much harder for Dr. Chou to get her samples.
Legislation alone is not enough. To really protect the dolphins around Taiwan, it is necessary to do basic scientific surveys in order to get a firm handle on their numbers, habits, behavior, and possible reasons for beaching. This information can be used to educate fishermen about dolphins and the goals for protecting them.
Fisherman's friend
In 1960, Dr. John Lilly, one of the first to study dolphins, anticipated that "humans will be able to communicate with the bottlenose dolphin within a decade or two." He even tried to produce a dolphin dictionary. But will there be a day when dolphins and fishermen can reach a modus vivendi and share fisheries resources?
This may not be a dream. An Earth Journal article entitled "Smarts: Notes on Dolphin Brain Power, Communication Skills, and Social Style," states that, "In coastal Brazil, a group of female bottlenose dolphins and offspring has participated in cooperative hunting with fishermen for nearly 150 years. Fishermen with nets line the shore and wait for dolphins to chase mullet towards them. After the nets are cast, the dolphins feast on the confused fish that manage to escape."
Perhaps the day when people understand how to learn from the animals will be the day the dolphin wars come to an end.
In the 1980s, fishermen sold some dolphins to Hong Kong's Ocean Park, Ta iwan's Ocean World, and other oceanariums for training and performances. （photo by Kuo Chin-lung ）
Dolphins were brought under the protection of the Wildlife Conservation Law in 1990, but some people still kept a few （illegally） as tourist attractions. Though separated from the open seas by only a net, these dolphins are not free.
With the tourist tide at low ebb, fish kept for visitors to feed the dolphins have gone bad, making for a very unpleasant odor.
The "Dolphin Safe" label means that the tuna inside was caught using methods that reduce the accidental take of dolphins to a minimum.
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