"what about fish writhing in trawlers, rats squirming in laboratories or chickens cowering in broiler-houses?" indeed. What about Warfarin-laden mice staggering along your basement floor?

The Cove exploits both the fantasies of western consumers that their own consumption has no connection to the death of any animal and even more sinister, the West's residual anti-Japanese racism.

A society that no longer confronts the death aspect of all life cycles is unable to discern between "brutal" slaughter and humane slaughter. The passage into and out of the world is very often traumatic and not all deaths are the peaceful slide into unconsciousness that we like to imagine they are. Our disconnect with death and dying makes rich fodder to promote hypocritical finger pointing and violent blaming of working class primary producers who are in the business of doing the dirty work that supports affluent Western lifestyles, whether it's loggers, miners, fishers, or cattle farmers.

Further, melodramatic propaganda like The Cove distracts from a sorely needed fact-based discussion on the conservation of endangered species and habitat. It's a Hollywood construct that bears no more resemblance to a rational thesis on human-animal relations than the animated film Pocahontas does to North American aboriginal history.

It promotes the reactionary bigotry and self-righteous grandstanding that erodes critical thinking.

Sadly, I expect it will be a massive success.

Surely, a film made about a brutal slaughter of dolphins does not cancel out the possibility of films made about the brutal treatment of cows etc (which I fully agree IS an issue we need to tackle in the meat industry). One issue does not negate the other. As for your point about "cuter" animals being more important to us than others - there is some truth in that, due to human nature and our perception of what is appealing, but it is not always true (there have been many campaigns to save sharks for example, and they're hardly cuddly). Nor is it certain that this will always be the case. As you point out, animal rights in general are a fairly recent concept, and mindsets are still changing - I have no doubt that in future they will change for the better, and this film is only part of that progression.

Finally - it's not indoctrination. It's an argument supported by facts, and audiences are free to see it or not see it, agree with it or not agree with it, same as with any other documentary. Gore, Spurlock, and all the others cited at least have the courage to nail their colours to the mast - it's the ideologies that go unspoken and creep their way into supposedly neutral productions that often have the most "indoctrinating" effect.

The argument of the rights of 'fisherfolk to protect their harvests and the rights of the Greenpeacers to protect our obviously intelligent mammals is a moot point, really - both parties are perhaps right in their thinking.

What doesn't seem to be noted is that the resulting meat sold in restaurants in Japan is possibly unfit for human consumption due to the high levels of mercury in the meat. This point is played down by both the Japanese and western media and the reasons why this mercury is present at all seems to be toatally ignored.

Perhaps we are all to blame for slowly poisoning the seas with our illicit (and condoned) dumping of hazardous waste in the deep deas. We do we put all our user-friendly electronics when consumers refuse to pay a 'clean recycling' surcharge and manufacturers refuse for enact clean disposal of noxious by-products and governments refuse to legislate that manufacturers are responsible for the their products when these become scrap, so we get kids being poisoned in the third world trying to extract precious metals from old computers and refigerator graveyards being quietly kept hidden from public view.

Unless we all start taking resposibilty for the products we buy and dispose of at the end of their life and demand our respective politicians create laws to protect us from ourselves, things are only going to get worse.

... the west's factory farms [don't] look pretty on celluloid. Yet we don't seem to care very much about that. After all, cows aren't dolphins.

Surely, it's a matter of degree? Last I saw an abbattoir in operation, they didn't drive the cattle surrounded by noisome vehicles into a field to be speared slowly to a gory death in front of the other animals.

The Japanese do have as much right to eat what they want sustainably. After all, their membership of the International Whaling Commission(a different issue) is voluntary. They actually show pretty good restraint here - after all they could simply leave and do what they wanted.

However, they are bollocks awful at putting their point across coherently. Rather than leaving the IWC and demonstrating they could whale sustainably they use the scientific loophole - making themselves look in the wrong.

Same in this case. How many farms would threaten to arrest camera crews and harass them etc. If the Japanese believed they could make a coherent point all they needed to do was let the camera crew in, explain their points, and it would be pretty difficult to argue with. (after all western fisherman kill more dolphins no doubt with huge nets, and the manner of death, slowly drowning, is probably as bad.

This 'cultural' argument is pretty common in Japan. In fact, pretty much anything wrong with the society is put down to cultural-differences - even when the majority of Japanese are adversely affected by it. Most of the time it's all bullshit. It's just an excuse to keep the status-quo.

One issue does not negate the other.

In other words, a false dichotomy.
Besides, dolphins are cool, everyone knows that. Cows are arseholes.

a false dichotomy

The reason I fear it isn't is that it seems reasonable to suppose that the media's emphasis on cuteness may be entrenching reluctance to see the needs of the animal kingdom as a whole. It's not just that people are encouraged to feel that if they look after dolphins they don't have to worry about cows. Efforts to protect biodiversity are often hamstrung by people's attachment to species that damage others. Thus grey squirrels, parakeets, Canada geese etc have to be allowed to run riot because they're popular.

The Cove is shocking for people because most of them haven't seen films like Earthlings. Slaughtering and torturing animals goes on every minute of everyday but that does not make it right. I'm happy this dramatic film about this dirty little Japanese secret is getting so much attention and who knows it might bring out more empathy for other beings who share this planet with us.

Sadly the dolphin slaughter is just the tip of the iceberg when you consider the destruction that we are currently wreaking on the oceans. The consensus in the scientific community is that we will have entirely destroyed the whole world's fish stocks by 2048. This means no-one will have any fish to eat ever again.

This issue is poorly understood by the public, allowing the fishing lobby to influence regulatory bodies around the world to ignore the advice of their fisheries scientists without much in the way of public objection.

Thus, although films like The Cove might seem to trade on the cuteness of dolphins, surely it has value if it raises people's awareness and makes them think twice about what they eat. Even better if it raises the whole fisheries debate to a level of public consciousness that gets the politicians interested.

I find it rather hilarious that every time a documentary seeks to do something morally fruitful, there are those who argue that the the documentary should have concentrated on a bigger moral problem. Nobody objects to the endless production of cheep entertainment, and nobody tells the makers of Come dine with me to address the issue of child abuse instead of discussing cooking. But as soon as somebody does the noble thing and seeks to talk about ethics in these entirely entertainment-based times, the righteous come out to criticise him or her for not being ethical enough. Could we not, just once, be content with the fact that at least somebody is addressing ethics?

The road of criticism here is extremely tedious, for one could always maintain that there are greater moral issues to be addressed. Talk of homeless people and somebody will point out the starving in Third world countries. Talk of the starving and somebody will point out the sick dying without proper health care. Could we do the logical thing and let people address different issues, one at a time?

I thoroughly agree that more attention should be put on British agriculture. I have seen enough of farms to know that the suffering that goes on is far indeed from the idyllic image depicted in the media. But this does not rule out mentioning the dolphins - on the contrary, dolphins may enable us to one day consider the cows, too.

Once you have learned of the level of intelligence that dolphins posess, how can you possibly compare the argument that they ought not to be slaughtered next to the case for the more docile creatures such as cows and chickens?
There seems, to me, a greater purpose to dolphins that we could perhaps even learn from. Cows and chickens and their like are for killing and eating.