Turtle Slaughter on Bali

by Robin Marinos

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The BMR International Dive Center, on Jalan Segara Lor 15, Tajung, Bali, are friendly neighbors of the largest and best known slaughtering grounds of sea turtle on the earth. This Dive Center's personnel and ownership showed absolute indifference to the turtle trade and massacre occurring next door. The Dive Center is so close that one can hear the turtles screaming sounds, like screaming babies, when they are being massacred.
Rear view from the BMR Diving Center, a Japanese-Indonesian joint venture, visibly neighbors to the sea turtle pens/slaughter areas, an overwhelming hypocrisy !  Upon arriving to the turtle holding pens, some of BMR's Dive Instructors were playing cards inside one pen beside dehydrated, starving, and slowly rotting Green sea turtles.
One of the many uncontrolled and unmonitored methods by which turtles are caught, open sea netting (this time as bycatch). Now as the Green sea turtle becomes more and more extinct, the calling is to have the Turtle trade totally banned without exception to Tradition in Bali, since many alternative foods exist now. Plus evidence gathered proves that this trade is primarily a commercial exploitation of loosely to non enforced laws, not as argued, providers of Balinese traditional needs! Most Balinese are absolutely indifferent about having turtle or other forms of food.
Green sea turtles, the major victim of the turtle trade, helplessly stuck on sand in one of the many holding pens at Tanjung, Bali. This controversial trade is believed to be one of the most gruesome existing on earth today and has far reaching detrimental side effects to the Indonesian archipelago, its beaches, coral reefs, and ecosystems. For these reasons there is a general call for support to totally abolish this trade, and to consequentially enforce the ban with extremely heavy penalties and fines!
 
Return to  Marine Biodiversity and Conservation in Indonesia
Distributed by the Interdisciplinary Minor in Global Sustainability at the University of California, Irvine.