The dolphin capture at Futo used this method, which has been practices along the Izu Peninsula for centuries. It is now used only at Futo, however, owing to too few people to continue it, and because the operation is unprofitable. Once impounded within a port, the dolphins are again confused with loud sounds, and moved with boats and nets in groups of 30-odd animals to a pier near shore that is suitable for landing them, while gradually making the enclosure smaller. After the dolphins have nowhere to flee, their captors punch sharp fireman's hooks into the animals' bodies to draw them near the boats, and then tie ropes to their tails. A crane lifts the dolphins out of the water tail-first to land them, loading them several to a vehicle in trucks waiting at the pier.
Trucks take the dolphins to a nearby slaughterhouse to be killed and butchered.
As the dolphins are living as they are landed and taken to the slaughterhouse, butchering there also proceeds while they are still alive, and begins by slitting their throats with a kitchen knife, or a blade on a long handle that looks like a halberd, after which the dolphins writhe violently in a pool of their own blood and die while making wailing noises. In Japan this drive fishery is now conducted mainly off the Izu Peninsula, and off the Kii Peninsula of Wakayama Prefecture. In the past many blue white dolphins were captured, with the drive fishery catch in 1975 said to have been 20,000, but now the fisherman take many bottle-nosed dolphins. When the captured dolphins are to be processed into meat, they are apparently killed and butchered immediately, but on this occasion the herd of dolphins driven into the port on October 17 was kept as is until the 21st because some would be taken to aquariums. The dolphins were not fed during this period, apparently because aquariums requested withholding food to make them easier to handle.