Animal welfare activists accuse Japan of brutally slaughtering some 20,000 dolphins and small whales every year in the "biggest massacre of its kind in the world," said the Animal Welfare Institute and Humane Society International, which organized the protest in Washington.

"Japanese fishermen round up pods of dolphins with speedboats and trap them in a small cove where they kill most of them for their meat, often beating them to death with lead pipes," turning the sea water into a churning, scarlet pool of blood, said Rebecca Regnery, deputy director of Humane Society International.

A few of the dolphins are spared and sold to the aquarium industry, but they are so traumatized, they don't live long in captivity, marine biologist Naomi Rose said.

Amid calls over a megaphone of "Shame on Japan, stop the slaughter," dozens of protesters wearing foam dolphin costumes were herded by other activists dressed as Japanese fishermen wielding spears made of tin foil to the Japanese embassy, where they lay down in the midday sun for a die-in.

"We're here to send a message to the Japanese that the world is watching and knows that the dolphin hunt is cruel and inhumane," Humane Society International spokesman Martin Mortofano told AFP.

"They've been doing this for years but just because it's a historical practice doesn't mean that they have to keep doing it.

"Slavery was a historical practice and everybody acknowledges now that it was one of the great blights upon humanity," he said as an official wearing an ear-piece emerged from the embassy, took pictures and then went back into the building.

Timed to coincide with the start of the dolphin hunt in Japan, the demonstration was one of scores around the world to urge Japan to stop hunting dolphins and other cetaceans to the edge of extinction.

"They have to stop doing it or they are going to wipe out the dolphins around their islands," Humane Society International's senior scientist, Naomi Rose, told AFP.

According to Rose, around 17,000 Dall's porpoises and up to 3,000 dolphins and orcas are killed by the Japanese every year in open-ocean harpoon hunts and the coastal drive hunt.

Similar protests were held in nearly 50 cities around the world including London and Berlin, Hong Kong, Kolkata and Manila, Caracas and Vancouver.

Activists in Washington and London said the Japanese people are unaware that the cruel hunts take place and that dolphin meat, which contains high levels of toxins, is making it onto their dinner plates.

At the London protest, Andy Ottoway, director of Campaign Whale, said little was being done to stop "this secret slaughter."

"Even the Japanese public is largely unaware that these appalling cruel hunts are taking place," he said.

In Washington, Serda Ozbenian of AWI said the Japanese government hides the brutal hunts from the people.

"The Japanese people don't know about the hunts because the Japanese government won't let them know," said Ozbenian.

"They do the hunt behind tarpaulins so the Japanese people don't know. They sneak the meat into school lunches so the Japanese people don't know," she said.

"The Japanese people are the biggest victims of this: they're being given tainted meat and they have no idea their government is cruelly slaughtering animals," she said.

A Japanese newspaper reporter at the Washington die-in told AFP the dolphin hunt was "not a big issue in Japan," while a Japanese student who had just left the embassy said he didn't know anything about the hunt.

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