Live Streaming: Great Adventure in the Wilderness

Chapter 524: Chapter 521: Ingenious

Richard’s actions were not directed against Japan.

In Florida, Norway, Iceland, his active presence was known, and he was even repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, spending time behind bars almost every year.

“A single dolphin placed in the right location can earn them a million a year. If you interfere, they’ll break your hands,” he said.

“My colleagues, Jane Tipson and Jenny May, were sacrificed because of this. At the time, we were protesting Norway’s dolphin trade with a hunger strike. I fainted on the tenth day and ended up in the hospital. Then Jenny became their target, followed her to the beach, and used her belt to strangle her to death.”

“My God.”

Mugalen was speechless and held great respect for the old man in front of him.

Just like the previous street interviews, in Richard’s view, Japan’s slaughtering of dolphins was just the action of a few towns and the government.

Japan is not always so with wildlife; it’s smaller in size than Sicuan, yet it has 800,000 wild boars, more than 4 million deer, 30,000 bears, and 150,000 monkeys. The numbers might be hard to believe, but it’s the truth.

Bi Fang explained to Mugalen, “All of Huaxia doesn’t even have 20,000 black bears, but there are over 30,000 in Japan, an island nation. So many that human intervention is needed for population control. Therefore, Japan’s slaughter of dolphins is motivated by many deeper reasons.”

So many black bears, that killing a hundred might not even be enough.

The dietary habits of the Japanese are a bit distinct among the major developed countries. Most other developed nations are continental and have large pastures, like Central Country, and their meat is mostly from livestock such as beef and pork.

With its small territory and numerous volcanoes, it was inevitable for Japan to turn to the sea for food.

Even after economic development and an increase in meat imports, the proportion of fish in the Japanese diet has decreased compared to the past. However, it still plays a more significant role than in other countries.

In such an environment, the Japanese themselves view the act of capturing sea fish and mammals differently from most people.

To fish there must be fishermen; to the Japanese, dolphins are like wolves to a hunter.

And it’s even somewhat different; hunters killed wolves in the past to protect deer, but now what are the Japanese killing dolphins to protect?

To protect the very oceans they over-fished and depleted?

Having slaughtered all the deer, they now turn to kill the wolves, claiming it’s because the wolves have depleted the deer population and thus wolves’ numbers must be controlled. Is this not morally questionable?

Richard felt that the Japanese did not realize this, much like a child who breaks a vase and stubbornly refuses to admit it, insisting it was the family cat that broke it.

“Some say, ‘If you eat beef or mutton, you have no right to condemn the killing of dolphins or other animals,’ but that’s incorrect. After all, livestock and wildlife are different,” he continued.

“Humans breed livestock and enter into a covenant with them with feed in exchange for their meat, even to the measurable extent of how much feed equals a pound of meat. It’s a form of cultivation-based equivalence exchange.”

“But wildlife owes you nothing, and there will always be animals that, for various reasons such as population numbers, are not suitable to eat. Now humans have a responsibility to proactively maintain ecological balance because human capabilities have evolved too rapidly in the past hundred years.”

Driving into the mountains along a winding mountain road, shooting whatever one sees and dragging it back.

Wildlife can no longer protect itself simply through the remoteness and density of the forest.

The same applies at sea. If you read “Moby Dick,” you know that in the past, whaling was a matter of risking your life—it was an ode to human hunting, a testament to courage, a gamble between creatures.

That was the genuine relationship of normal hunting in the food chain.

Now, on large ships, they easily catch up, kill with a single shot, and lift the catch with cranes. Don’t even mention the butchering—if necessary, an onboard production line could turn them straight into canned food.

The Faroe Islands, Denmark’s largest fishing location, enjoy a comfortable life with an average income of 70,000 Ugly Yuan, thanks to the commercial catch of herring, mackerel, and so on.

Yet even so, locals have not given up on the traditional practice of whale hunting. They promote the activity of hunting cetaceans extensively under the guise of training courage for the youth, and much of the meat from the mass slaughter is not even consumed, but rather thrown into the trash.

Almost every year, news reports condemn the practice, and the year before last, the noise over whaling was so loud that they retaliated by killing even more dolphins…

The reason it’s called retaliatory is that they have prior offenses. In 2012, dissatisfied with the European Union’s mackerel fishing quota, Iceland and the Faroe Islands ignored the advice of ICES and unilaterally increased the mackerel catch from 630,000 tons to 800,000 tons.

The same situation occurred this time. The usual few hundred killings suddenly surged to 1,428 dolphins, and many of them ended up being thrown away into the trash, unused.

If humans allow themselves to eat whatever they want, they can easily wipe out any species.

In the past, having enough to eat was satisfactory, but now, with the average annual income of Japanese at 40,000 Ugly Yuan, they are still demanding too much from cetaceans.

The ethical shift regarding food is a long process. Some previously considered normal foods will gradually be eliminated from our diets.

Foods not prohibited by law can be chosen based on personal knowledge—it doesn’t have to be a blanket rule, nor is there a need to force others to agree with one’s own views.

But as part of humanity, enjoying meat filled by feed and products created by polluting nature, we should be kinder to nature within the realms of what we deem reasonable and what we can achieve.

Mugalen seemed to finally understand, “First, greed, second, unwillingness to admit fault, third, destruction of nature, fourth, the bloody slaughter, goodness, they are quite capable.”

“Exactly,” Richard confirmed.

“If it weren’t illegal to kill me, they would certainly do it.”

Thinking of the two companions still lying in the hospital, everyone couldn’t help nodding.@@novelbin@@

Richard sighed, “Maybe it’s all my fault, because of the program ‘The Story of Dolphins,’ which created this multi-billion dollar industry. The show sparked people’s desire to swim with the dolphins, touch them, kiss them.”

“No,” Bi Fang shook his head, “Clearly you don’t study Marxist Philosophy. From a materialist historical perspective, as long as dolphins remain intelligent and capable of performing, this industry would have emerged sooner or later. The only difference is the timing.”

The car quickly passed the town government building, and after confirming that no one was following, they arrived at the foot of a deserted and remote mountain.

Mandy opened a black bag, neatly packed with dozens of raincoats in various colors, picked out camouflage raincoats and distributed them to everyone. Taking advantage of the storm, when hardly anyone was going out, they all ascended the mountain.

The torrential rain made the mountain path extremely muddy. Jerret almost slipped with a single step, but luckily Mugalen behind him gave him a hand.

“You two are too old, you should have stayed in the car,” Mugalen pointed at Jerret and Richard.

Richard shook his head; how could he possibly miss out?

And Jerret as well, “We have limited equipment. I need to observe the entire bay before I can decide where to place the cameras. Otherwise, we can’t shoot a qualified documentary.”

The mud on their shoes kept piling up, making everyone feel as if their shoes had become more than twice as heavy. Mandy accidentally stepped into a mud puddle and lost her shoes when she pulled her foot out.

Bi Fang poked around with a walking stick for a long time before fishing them out.

“Good heavens, I don’t even want to wear them anymore,” Mandy held up her sport shoes covered in mud.

Bi Fang said, “You can go barefoot if you don’t want to wear them, unless you don’t mind getting bitten by some weird bugs, or cut by sharp stones resulting in a lot of bleeding, followed by a bacterial invasion. First the wound would start to fester, then the whole foot would swell, becoming bloated with bruises, and in the end, you might have to amputate not just the lower leg but potentially the thigh…”

“OKOK… please stop talking about it, I still want my legs,” Mandy pleaded repeatedly, rinsed the mud out of her shoes with bottled water, put them back on, and continued to help each other move forward.

Soon, a yellow metal sign blocked their way.

It read: “Beware of falling rocks,” and “Wild beasts are lurking.”

The sign was large, blocking the entire path, with a barbed wire fence on the side, stretching all the way to the edge of a nearby cliff.

Richard chuckled bitterly, “If it weren’t raining, there would be fishermen patrolling the mountains here with knives. This is also a national park. Those fishermen told me: ‘If word of what happens here gets out, we’re finished.’ They said so themselves.”

Bi Fang touched the barbed wire, then led the group to the edge of the cliff and helped each person get past the barrier.

After passing through layers of trees, everyone could finally see the bay surrounded by mountains on three sides through the gaps in the forest.

“Is this Dolphin Bay?”

Bi Fang and Mugalen looked down at the shallow bay below the mountain. The coastline was only a few dozen meters long on either side, with low hills, but it was this narrow strip of shore that was littered with the bodies of thousands of dolphins.

Dolphins would always follow their migratory path to Taiji Town. This had not changed for thousands of years, and all the fishermen needed to do was wait for them to walk into the trap.

About a dozen fishing boats lined up, inserting long poles into the water with flanges on the ends, then hammered the tops of the poles, creating a sound barrier.

They took advantage of the dolphins’ sensitivity to sound, herding hundreds of them towards the shore.

They were all fleeing for their lives, away from that wall of sound.

Once they entered the bay surrounded by mountains on three sides, all the fishermen had to do was block the last exit with a net, and not a single dolphin could escape.

Each year during the dolphin season, the shallow bay turned blood red.

It was a real blood-red color without any exaggeration. From above, via satellite, you could even clearly see the bay turning into a red spot.

Those dolphins not selected by marine parks, regardless of their size, were all killed.

The massacre at Dolphin Bay was an ingenious slaughter because it was one that cut off a lineage.

It killed all the dolphins who were frightened and realized the cruelty and evil of humans, so that others continued to naively consider humans their friends, falling into the trap time and time again.