SAVING THE WHALES ET AL.

Hayden Panettiere's A Real Life Hero

By Elizabeth C.

SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE ONCE SANG A SONG SAYING WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER HERO, but that is so not true! We need all of them we can get.

And picking up the slack is Hayden Panettiere, who plays a hero not only on TV but in real life.

The 20-year-old looker who stars in the deliberately shamltzy series Heroes could spend her free time hitting L.A.'s nightclubs or New York's fashion shows. But does she? Nooo!

Rather, she devotes herself to trying to avert the slaughter of whales and dolphins by Japanese fishermen.

Two years ago, the actress was attacked as she tried to prevent the slaughter of dolphins along the coast of Taiji, Japan.

That event was captured in the documentary The Cove, which beat out 878 other movies to win an Academy Award for documentary filmmaking last month.

Now Paniettiere is back in Taiji, where she is seeking to persuade local fishermen and officials there are other ways to generate income for the community.

“What we’re trying to do is bring more awareness to the issue to the many different parts of the issue and also to the Japanese people to tell them that they have a right to know that dolphin and whale meat that their consuming is highly toxic and loaded with mercury,’’ the actress told SkyNews.

"We wanted to discuss our ideas and just havea very peaceful, very humane conversation about trying to put our heads together and come up with a solution. Because we know tat there’s a lot of ways of going about this and a lot of different ways of generating change."

Panettiere apparently has offered to be a spokeswoman for the village to “help generate tourism,’’ an idea that’s been mocked as the narcissistic drivel on some web comment boards.

But as humans move inexorably toward the mass extinction of wildlife, for once I’d like to hear more of such drivel. Thank you, Hayden, for bringing attention to the plight of these dolphins.