Imagine you are swimming alongside your family, and you are captured, corralled, wrestled, driven over, and harpooned, all while witnessing slaughter all around you as you swim frantically in a sea of crimson red, trying to escape.  

Although this may sound horribly graphic and traumatizing, this is what's occurring to hundreds of pods of bottlenose dolphins every year in an annual hunt that takes place in a cove in Taiji, Japan.

According to CNN, about 500 dolphins were driven into the cove this year, a larger number than usual, according to the local Taiji fishermen's union. A fisherman who is a union board member, and who did not want to be named, told CNN that the total number of dolphins to be captured or slaughtered was less than 100, and that the rest would be released.

The annual hunt is considered the "focal point of the Taiji community's dolphin hunting season, which many in the community in southwest Japan view as a long-held tradition." However, the controversial act has left environmental activists, politicians and celebrities in an uproar due to its "inhumane" practices.

According to The Guardian, "'These dolphins are wrangled and wrestled into the killing cove, where they've sustained multiple injuries. Dolphin killers deliberately run over the pod with skiffs, they wrestle them, man-handled them into captive nets before even being slaughtered,' Melissa Sehgal, a Sea Shepherd activist, told Reuters.

"The methods used to capture and kill the dolphins have attracted widespread condemnation. Fishermen bang metal poles together beneath the water to confuse the animals' hypersensitive sonar before herding them into shallow water, where they are left for up to several days before being taken to the cove to be slaughtered.

"Hidden from view beneath tarpaulin covers, the fishermen drive metal rods into the dolphins' spinal cords and leave them to die. 'It takes up to 20 to 30 minutes for these dolphins to die, where they bleed out, suffocate or drown in the process of being dragged to the butcher house,'" Sehgal said.

From there, the dolphins are sent to a warehouse to be chopped up into "slabs of meat" for human consumption that is considered toxic -- "up to 5,000 times more toxic than allowed by the World Health Organization," The Cove's director, Louie Psihoyos, told the Guardian.

Rare Albino Calf Separated from Mother, Transferred to Whale Museum

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society also points out that among the original 'superpod' was a rare albino calf that was snatched from his or her mom. Considered "a rare and lucrative find to exploit as a spectacle in captivity," the albino calf was transferred directly to Taiji Whale Museum.

"Japanese press is reporting that the mother rejected the calf and so they rescued her, but that is a blatant fabrication as the thousands who watched our live stream of the kidnapping can attest. The baby is possibly blind and/or deaf, as is the case with many albinos. If so, this could be one of the reasons that this terrified calf clung so closely to his or her mother in the cove and now clings to a dolphin companion sharing the calf's tiny tank."

U.S. Ambassagor to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, Actress/ Activist Hayden Panettierre and Japanese Officials React

Recently installed U.S. ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy took to Twitter to share her feelings on the matter.

Kennedy has received some backlash on social media from the community and lawmakers -- and politicians such as Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga and Taiji mayor Kazutaka Sangen defended its country's practices, CNN adds.

"Dolphin fishing is one of traditional fishing forms of our country and is carried out appropriately in accordance with the law," Suga told reporters at a news conference Monday. "Dolphin is not covered by the International Whaling Commission control and it's controlled under responsibility of each country."

"We have fishermen in our community and they are exercising their fishing rights," Sangen added. "We feel that we need to protect our residents against the criticisms."

Nashville star Hayden Panettiere, who has been actively involved in dolphin and whale activism also spoke out on Twitter.

"In 2007, the actress peacefully protested the cruelty to dolphins along with fellow supporters, but it was broken up by fishermen. You can see scenes of her experience in the Academy-Award winning documentary The Cove," MTV reported. "In 2010, Panettiere traveled to Taiji with world-champion boxer and boyfriend Wladimir Klitschko to continue her mission to end the dolphin hunt. According to the Los Angeles Times, Hayden tried 'tried to meet the mayor and representatives from the local fisheries union, but she and Jeff Pantukhoff, an anti-whaling activist from the U.S., were blocked at the door of the town hall.'"

In the past several days, environmental trailblazer, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society , has provided livestreams "showing bottlenose dolphins splashing frantically as they tried to escape their human captors. Dolphins separated by nets into smaller partitions bobbed up and down, trying to reach other members of their pod. The group said that the dolphins appeared bloodied, and had had nothing to eat since their capture in Taiji Cove four days ago."

While the union representative told CNN that fishermen had introduced what they considered a "more humane" method of slaughtering the dolphins -- "cutting their spines on the beach to kill the animals more swiftly and cause them less pain" -- environmentalists and activists aren't buying it.

The Academy Award-winning documentary, The Cove highlights the gruesome fact that "more than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises are brutally killed each year off the coast of Japan," according to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Link to Peru's Dolphin Controversy

Besides a worldwide petition, the annual Japanese hunt brights to light, another controversy that has also enraged animal conservation groups -- the brutal slaughtering of thousands of dolphins off the coast of Peru, where the mammals are used as shark bait for an Asian delicacy known as shark fin soup.

Shark fin soup is a very expensive dish in China, among other Asian countries. The extravagant dish comes at a much higher cost -- not only on a humane and ethical level, but the price paid could be the disruption of our oceans' entire ecosystem.

Both the dolphin and shark populations have been devastated by the hunt, and a new investigation reveals that at least 10,000 dolphins are killed off the coast of Peru each year by fisherman who use them as shark bait, according to watchdog group Asociación Mundo Azul.

Check out the trailer for The Cove, which was also a winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The Cove follows a high-tech dive team on a mission to discover the truth about the dolphin capture trade as practiced in Taiji, Japan.