Hayden Panettiere has a new blog post up on TakePart.com sharing her thoughts on the fight to save whales and dolphins; and the passion that drives her to support orgs like The Whaleman Foundation and Surfers for Cetacean. She writes,

The goals of our campaign are to end whaling along with all commercial dolphin and porpoise hunts worldwide while raising awareness to the other threats whales and dolphins face.

There is a brutal practice in Japan that has unnecessarily and painfully taken the lives of tens of thousands of dolphins and other small whales. They blind and frighten these helpless animals by hammering on metal poles in the water, driving them into small coves where they are trapped in nets and then killed. I experienced this first hand when Jeff invited me and Isabel Lucas, our Australian spokesperson, to join him on a trip to the notorious dolphin-killing cove of Taiji, Japan in October 2007.

That now famous event — one that almost ended violently — is currently being shown in the new documentary “The Cove“; which reveals the horrors of the Japanese dolphin slaughter.