Indonesian Fisherman Accused of Slaughtering Dolphins

Indo Surf Life - 

NGOs have recently accused Indonesian fisherman of actively pursuing and killing whales and dolphins for use as bait despite laws forbidding the practice.

However, Indonesian government officials have denied these allegations after a US based NGO, Earth Island Institute (EII), displayed photo and video evidence on their website.

“It is not true. How could that be? I have never heard of dolphins being hunted before,” said director of fish resources at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Agus Apun Budhiman at a press conference on Wednesday.

“Local people consider them [dolphins] as man’s best friends, so they would not go after them, let alone eat or use their meat as bait,” he added. He further stated that any capture of marine mammals was purely accidental.

The video evidence produced by EII showed a man describing how they would poach dolphins and use their meat as bait in long lines intended to harvest shark fins.

“They use dynamite placed in beer bottles and throw them at dolphins. After dolphins get too weak, they capture them and tie their tails. They use them as bait for sharks as they want [shark] fins that are worth up to Rp 1 million [$117] for one kilogram,” the fisherman said in the video interview.

The site also showed a picture of a killer whale calf carcass about to be butchered and a picture of a dead pygmy sperm whale. Despite the video and photo evidence, Agus still denies such findings have any basis.

“[NGOs] presented us with similar videos on how dolphins are captured and used as bait at the Cites [Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species] meeting in Doha in 2010,” he said. “At the time we asked whether they were sure the images came from Indonesia, because it could be from somewhere else.

“It came as a surprise to us because we had never heard of it before. We are aware of shark killings and are collecting data on that and trying to control it.”

Indonesia explicitly bans non-traditional methods for hunting marine mammals.

Femke den Haas, founder of the Jakarta Animal Aid Network, an organization that works with EII, said that principally, traditional hunting methods have been well documented in Lamalera, a small island off of Flores. “However, the capture of dolphins and orcas with the use of motorboats, which is happening now, has nothing to do with tradition,” she said. She also stated that the claims on the EII website did not cast blame on Lamalera alone.

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