Eavesdropping in The Cove: Interspecies ethics, public and private space, and trauma under water

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Cove is an activist documentary that seeks to stop the dolphin drives in Taiji, Japan in which tens of thousands of dolphins annually are herded into a hidden lagoon where some are culled for dolphinaria and the majority slaughtered. This pro-cetacean effort proceeds by means of an intense, clandestine field deployment of high-tech cameras and audio recorders to infiltrate the forbidden above- and underwater space of the lagoon and expose the stabbing, suffering and dying. Responses to the film have questioned whether the resulting depiction of the coastal whalers is unethical, anti-Japanese or even racist, and whether the film's focus on dolphins neglects the broader catastrophe of marine life depletion. This article develops a spatial media approach to reframe these and raise other questions. Extrapolating from ‘eavesdropping’—a research practice that marine mammal scientists use to study dolphin-to-dolphin and dolphin-to-human communication—the article explores how The Cove extends document...

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