Dolphins Romp in Pacific Stampede While Shark Fins Bake on Hong Kong Roof

Dolphins off Southern California gave spectators the vision of a lifetime, as several common dolphin sub-pods got together for an ocean romp of near epic proportions.

“This has happened twice recently though it is very rare,” states Capt. David Anderson in the video description. “The line of wild dolphins could be seen from miles away churning up the water and, to the delight of whale watching passengers, the dolphins turned and stampeded directly over to the boat.”

Wrter Pete Thomas of GrindTV.com assures readers that the dolphins aren’t under attack in any way and no dolphins were struck or harmed in any way by the vessel. The whale watching boat came out on a regular cruise, and the dolphins put on a unique and very rare show.

French Roast News

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A mythical giant squid has been spotted alive for the first time by a team from Japan’s National Science Museum, who captured footage of the creature nearly a third of a mile below the surface of the ocean.

The giant squids grow up to 60 feet in length have been found dead on beaches and photographed in the ocean usually on the surface. This is the first time the massive creature has been seen below the waves, until filmed in a joint mission of Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) and the Discovery Channel. The footage will air in America on January 27.

Using a manned submarine, Kubodera and his colleagues made 100 trips into the ocean’s depths to spot the awesome sea creature. “The team used a specially designed camera to capture high definition images in deep water.” via CBS

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Animal Stewardship | Sea Life | Whales, Dolphins, Global Fishing

Shark’s Fin Slaughter Update

Shark fin traders in Hong Kong have been busted in what appears to be an attempt to raise increased public conerns about the possible obliteration of sharks from our planet. The fins formerly dried on the sidewalks of Hong Kong, where shark’s fin soup is served at wedding banquets and in luxury hotels.

In Hong Kong itself, demand for shark’s fin soup is actually declining says environmental campaigner Gary Stokes. “With the middle class becoming more affluent, the demand is definitely growing” in mainland China, Stokes said. via Huff Po

Previously:

Laws To End Brutal Shark Finning Offends Some Chinese Americans

Shark finning is one of the most brutal activities of the sea. The fins are hacked off a live shark, which is then thrown overboard where it sinks to the bottom of the sea and dies slowly.

Because America has demonized sharks, we are more insensitive to the practice of shark finning, perhaps even believing subconsciously that sharks get what they deserve.

Alice Newstead’s Activist Art

Alice Newstead Submits to the Horrors of Shark Finning

June 15, 2011: Alice Newstead has taken her protest against shark fishing to Hong Kong, again backed by Lush, the British cosmetics company. Instead of hanging in a store window as she did in Paris, Alice is hanging in an arts centre courtyard for 20 minutes at a time.

Her purpose is to protest the killing of 73 million sharks a year, threatening their extinction. The killing of the sharks is particularly inhumane. Their fins are sliced off to make the soup and they are thrown alive back into the water, unable to swim and sentenced to death.

Because Hong Kong serves as a key trend setting city among Asian communities, it’s only the people of Hong Kong who can lead the way to stopping this brutal luxury consumer practice of using shark fin soup as a display of wealth. Currently the fins are worth about $300 a pound.

In Taiji, Dolphin Slaughter Continues As Scientists & Activists Seek Personhood Status

Loris Gréaud: The Snorks on Nowness.com.

Actress Charlotte Rampling and director David Lynch weave together the threads of Loris Gréaud’s expansive project in the Parisian-art star’s new film The Snorks: A Concert for Creatures. Thirty-six months in the making, the film takes in everything from hip hop-avantists Antipop Consortium’s concert for deep-ocean dwellers, to a pyrotechnic sculpture of fireworks in Abu Dhabi, and traces Gréaud’s voyages exploring the possibility for communication between species. Inspired by bioluminescence––or biological production of light––used by deep-sea creatures to communicate with each other, the aesthetic adventurer broadcast specially commissioned music by Antipop Consortium at a depth of 4,000 meters and elicited vibrant bursts of light from the audience of plankton, unicellular creatures and jellyfish in response. “I gave them carte blanche,” says Gréaud of working with Antipop Consortium. “The only direction really was to play the game, to imagine they playing in front of aliens.” Ahead of the 28-minute film’s premiere at MK2 Bibliothèque next week and a forthcoming world tour combining screenings with Antipop Consortium performing the concert live, Gréaud unpicks the threads making up The Snorks.

Read on about The Snorks project at NOWNESS and The Snorks A Concert for Creatures website

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We are late in reporting about the annual slaughter of dolphins and whales in Taiji, Japan. Basically, nothing has changed in this barbaric cruelty against some of nature’s smartest creatures — all in the name of nationalism and man’s God-given right to control nature. We add controlling women for context, believing that Taiji’s patriarchal principles represent the ultra-orthodox values of male domination that are worldwide.

In spite of massive international protests against the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, and the Academy Award winning documentary ‘The Cove’, little has changed for these splendid creatures.

First, some recent thoughts about the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji and today’s news that at least one special white whale can imitate the voices of humans. Dolphins are known for trying to communicate with their captors.

A Whale With a Distinctly Human-Like Voice Science Daily

“Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds,” said Sam Ridgway of the National Marine Mammal Foundation. “Such obvious effort suggests motivation for contact.”

Taiji Dolphins: Marineland’s Cruelest Attraction Global Animal

Op-Ed: Sea World’s Convoluted Logic on Taiji’s Dolphin Slaughter Take Part

Dolphins Can Remain Alert for Up to 15 Days at a Time With No Sign of Fatigue Science Daily

Do Dophins Think Nonlinearly? Science Daily

Strong Opposition to Aquarium’s Plan to Import Beluga Whales NYTimes

Whales and dolphins are so intelligent they deserve same rights as humans, say experts The Independent

Anne Enke’s Dolphin Writing

Blood-soaked cove of dolphin blood in Taiji, JapanFemale, Dolphin-Loving Principles Can Win in Blood-Thirsty, Male-Dominated Taiji, Japan

My maiden writing into the topic of whales was When the Subject is Women’s and Whale Rights, the Japanese Fall Far From Grace, if we don’t count my high school senior paper on the meaning of the great white whale in Moby Dick.

Whaling is a very patriarchal tradition, and the subject of their hunt — whales and dolphins — are gorgeous animals that represent female principles.

When I wrote Let’s Hope Smart Sensuality Pink Dolphins are Smart Enough to Stay Out of Japanese Waters, I was unconsciously or semi-consciously making the same point. Now I understand why folklore has it that putting a pregnant woman in the boat attracts dolphins, and also why Dave sent a video of a dolphin attending the birth of a baby.

The real challenges in getting the Japanese to change their patriarchal whaling ways, is akin to convincing the Sudanese Islamists to stop flogging women.

Returning Ancient Greek ‘Person’ Status to Dolphins

The clues to dolphins as ‘female’ are prolific in Greek and Roman art, and also in earlier Minoan artifacts.

Joining the Dolphin Family

Dolphins leap above the waves off Alabama’s Orange Beach. Photo: Cal Britton, My ShotWriting as a guest blogger for National Geographic, Maddalena Bearzi of the Ocean Conservation Society has been in the company of dolphins — mothers and their calves — for 20 years. 

All around me, I see other dolphins. I feel I am part of a family, but it’s somehow different from my terrestrial one. We are a grand and flexible family, yet I have a strong sense that our underlying bonds remain constant. I reach a huddle of mothers and calves. Seven females are clustered, forming a protective screen of bodies around a pregnant female. They swim beside and below her, waiting for the moment to arrive.

Dolphin Brains Rival Human’s | The Japanese Slaughter Disgrace Continues

“Dolphins are sophisticated, self-aware, highly intelligent beings with individual personalities, autonomy and an inner life. They are vulnerable to tremendous suffering and psychological trauma,” says Emory University neuroscientist Lori Marino, a leading expert in the neuroanatomy of dolphins and whales

The patriarchal reality of the Taiji’s fishermen’s killing of the whales involves banging on metal poles to herd panicked dolphins into a cove, then spearing them to death in what protesters describe as a gory bloodbath. For animals with brains as large as humans and an established level of cognitive ability, this method of slaughtering dolphins is abhorrent to many.

‘The Cove’ Academy Award documentary director Ric O’Barry explains how he became a dolphin activist.

Observing Cuttalossa Farm | Can Humans Find Peace By Studying Animal Behavior? | Beehives Save Elephant Deaths

Before Monotheism, Killing Dolphins Was a Capital Crime

Returning Ancient Greek ‘Person’ Status to Dolphins AOC Green Beings

In ancient Greece, dolphins were seen as messengers for the gods. And while there was no knowledge of the fact that dolphins have lived on Planet Earth for 38-50 million years by current estimates, the mammals were revered and awarded ‘person’ status. 

The clues to dolphins as ‘female’ are prolific in Greek and Roman art, and also in earlier Minoan artifacts. PBS ‘Frontline” reports in “A whale of a business: man & marine mammals : dolphins in ancient mythology”.

Without romanticizing the centuries preceding the dawn of Christianity for women or for nature, it seems that Judaism, Christianity and Aristotle emerged in a coalition of thought that celebrated man’s rational nature while condemning women’s emotional, irrational and natural state of being. 

Simultaneously, in moving to embrace a single God, there was little room for feminine principles, and that includes dolphins.

After all, man — the superior creature — was dominant not only over women, but over nature.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, nature is the result of an orderly, hierarchical succession, where man is created separate from the land, seas, flora, and fauna. He is the boss, according to Genesis:

Farmers, Elephants & Bees

We’re all just walking each other home. ~ Ram Dass

Beehive Fences Keep African Elephants Away from Crops Wired Science July 12, 2011

Wired updates a 2009 story that caught our hearts — a woman’s idea of how to keep expanding elephant populations safe in their conflicts with Kenya’s farmers, whose crops are trampled by these wonderful creatures.

Elephants and Bees: Mother Nature Provides Possible Solution to Elephant Conservation in Africa AOC Green Beings

Just placing a beehive on land can scare the wits out of most elephants. Scientists speculate that result — after all, there were no bees in the hives — is linked to the fact that the elephants remember painful past encounters with African honeybees and avoid the sights and smells associated with them.

GoDaddy.com founder defends elephant-hunting video CNN

AOC will ask GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons to stop shooting elephants and instead support the work of Lucy King of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology by building bee fences in Africa.

Animals on Human Condition

Carversville, Cuttalossa Road, Cuttalossa Farm and a Peaceable Kingdom AOC Green Beings

Leaning casually against the fence, I had no idea that a vision of nearly epic importance was coming. Out of nowhere, the formation appeared … a simple, bucolic scene unfolded before my eyes that I will never forget.  I don’t remember who led the parade … probably one of the dogs, but they came two by two.

Unlike Noah’s Ark,  they were not matched pairs. The dog ambled along with the rooster. One of my precious Babydolls frolicked with a duck.

This Solebury barnyard menagerie of totally unrelated animals was paired in formation,  and everyone was getting along. 

Honestly, the goose’s bill was bobbing in the air, laughing away. The hens were cackling and the bog barked joyfully, creating an incomprehensibly silly sight.

The scene polarized me for several minutes, burning a vision of hope in my mind. It sounds so trite and overly simplistic to say this, but I remember thinking to myself: “If they can get along and have such a good time together … well, why can’t we humans do the same thing?”

These animals couldn’t be more different, but they had connected with each other, surmounting their differences to create a scene of unimaginable delight for themselves and the entire world.