Jim Yong Kim: You can't lift people out of poverty without growth, Interview with the Guardian

Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, talks to Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott about Kim's days as a demonstrator against the bank. Kim shares the bank's priorities on climate change and clean growth, and gender equality, and discusses the prospect of a Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bank to help meet massive infrastructure needs in middle-income countries.

Dolphin Deaths in Marine Parks and Aquariums

    Marine-mammal facilities are one of the most successful part of a industry built on the suffering of intelligent animals that are being extremely mistreated. In the wide ocean, social groups of dolphins swim up to 100 miles a day. However, in marines and aquariums, the dolphins only get to swim in small circles which make them unable to engage their natural behaviour. In marines, the dolphins are forced to perform tricks just to get food and they are usually torn apart from their family which gives them a lot of stress. The unbearable stress weakens the dolphin's immune system which causes them to die a lot earlier.

    First of all, the dolphins being torn apart from their families is a very stressful thing for them and can be unresistable. Hundreds of wild dolphins have been taken from the U.S. waters and have been placed in aquariums or marine parks. Even though the U.S. parks or zoos haven't taken the dolphins from the oceans since 1993, it is still allowed. Other countries have been consistently taking the animals from the wild and placing them in aquariums or parks which causes them to be torn up with their families pretty often. Capturing or taking even one of the dolphins can hugely affect the entire pod because in the wild, the female dolphins spend their whole lives with their mothers and sisters. If they get torn apart from the ones that they spent their whole life together with, that would be extremely difficult for them to bear. These days, they surround the dolphins with nets to track pods just so they can obtain a female dolphin of breeding age. The net pulls them up and unwanted dolphins are just thrown back into the water which can cause the families to separate very easily. Some of the dolphins die due to stress and some of them get pneumonia when water enter their lungs through their blowholes. So separating the dolphins from their families can cause a lot of stress and can often lead to death as well.

    In addition to the cruelty of taking wild dolphins from their natural habitats and separating them from their family, they keep dolphins in captivity. This dooms them to living their life as attractions at aquariums or theme parks around the world. They are forced to perform tricks in front of huge crowds and screaming people which gives the dolphins a big amount of stress. They are also forced to swim with tourists and are often hand fed or petted by the tourists. The biggest problem is that they are forced to swim in tiny, barren concrete tanks. The dolphins navigate by echolocation but in the tanks, the reverberations bounces of the walls which drives some of them insane. For the dolphins, keeping them in tanks are basically keeping a blindfolded person in a jail cell. The trainers for the dolphins often force them to perform tricks by taking away their food or isolating animals that don't perform tricks. A marine-mammal behavioural biologist in Seattle says that captive dolphins demonstrated a lot of stress related behaviours such as self-inflicted trauma, induced vomiting, and aggressiveness. Some captive dolphins took their own lives by banging their heads against the walls or by refusing to come out of the water. This is because of their stress and frustration being captive.

Image : Google Image

Whaling in Japan (the final ruling from ICJ)

On 31 March 2014, ICJ ruled that Japan's Whaling directly violates the "International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling" whihch was initially raised by Australian government in June, 2013.
And ICJ ordered the accused group to stop Whaling.  In the process, ICJ also identified that Japan's Whaling was carried out for commercial rather scientific research purpose. As a result, a large amount of Whales were killed for wrong reason.
Japanese government was very disappointed about the ruling, but they have decided to comply with the results.

Source : Yonhap News, Media Pen, Google etc.
Image : Google Image