The official reason of killing is that the fishermen were told dolphins are "pests" by the government. How can one connect dolphins with such a title even with mere elementary school knowledge?! They certainly had their way: "Dolphins, along with whales, consume too much fish by nature, so that if their number decreases, we, human beings, will be left with more fish on our table." As the representative from Brazil commented during the IWC 2007 Meeting (International Whaling Commission), "... it is purely nonsense!"
Personally, I don't see the point of Japanese people trying to "defend" themselves by claiming this is just a different "ethic" in the far east, or criticizing other nations for slaughtering cows and such in order to find an excuse for themselves. Picking other people's wrongs doesn't help to correct our own!
Dolphins are commonly known and accepted as intelligent animals with feelings and emotions that are close to humans, but an innate smiling-face does not mean an invitation to their death or being eaten!
As to say "dolphin meat", we already learned that dolphins and many other sea life absorb mercury from the increasingly polluted oceans, and it is quite difficult or almost impossible for them to get rid of it even till the day they die, and a dolphin's body contains very high mercury in general. Not all fish producers will label their products honestly in the market, so you might be eating dolphin meat while believing it was some other type of fish as the movie shows.
The only way to improve ourselves as human beings is to correct our wrong behaviors as soon as we realize it. Or are we so full of ourselves that we need no further improvement any more?!
