Catherine McKay wrote: > > --- Kate Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:> > > i stopped eating tuna when it was hard to figure out > > which was which as far as being dolphin safe (i think its still > > controversial) & i don't miss it anyway as i try to avoid fish from the ocean due >to > > the high mercury levels > > Here in Canada, they have the cans marked dolphin safe > (picture of dolphin in circle with line through it!) > if there's no dolphin in them. That's the only kind I > buy, usually Clover Leaf. (Then you have to take it on > faith that they're not lying about it.)
There's never any dolphin in a can of tuna. Dolphins are mammals. I don't know what dolphin meat (that's a disturbing thought) would be like, but it's not fish. The issue is that schools of yellowfin tuna swim underneath pods of dolphins, generally in the warm Pacific waters, so commercial fisherman spot the dolphins and lower nets sometimes as big as a mile long and catch everything along with the tuna, and the dolphins end up drowning or being crushed. So the picture on some cans of a dolphin in a circle with a line through it means the tuna in that can has not been caught by encirclement (that is, in those huge nets) so, in theory, no dolphins have been killed. I'm not sure what happens to the dead dolphins, I think they're just thrown away, so killing them is for no reason other than commercial efficiency. In the early 1990s legislation was passed in the U.S. banning that type of huge net fishing for tuna, and countries whose fisherman still fish that way (Mexico, Panama) were not allowed to sell their tuna to the U.S. That legislation did save hundreds of thousands of dolphin's lives. Then there was NAFTA in the late 1990s and the desire by Clinton and others to lower barriers to trade, so Mexico and Panama (and maybe other countries) started lobbying for a return to the more efficient way of fishing. So the requirement now is that each boat that uses huge nets have a person on it to certify that no dolphins were hurt or killed. There's a way now to open the top of nets so the dolphins can escape and sometimes divers go into the water to free them. That's the requirement. Whether that's what happens, I don't know. I think that's the source of the controversy now. I always buy albacore tuna, the solid white type, rather than the light tuna, which is usually yellowfin. Albacore tuna is caught by line and hook rather than nets. I'm not sure why that is. My guess is that since they live near cold water maybe there are no dolphins to hang out with there, and so there's no way for fisherman to easily see where a huge group of tuna would be and so nets wouldn't work. Anyway, with albacore there's not the "were dolphins killed in the catching of this?" issue to worry about. There is the high mercury level in all fish now, so it's not a good idea to have fish any more than 3 times a week. That's a sad thing, for the fish that manage to stay alive (it must be affecting them) and for us. It's a sign of how we're poisoning the earth, and once it's done, it's hard and maybe impossible to go back. It's one of those obvious things that some people can't manage to see. Debra Shea
