Many years ago, when I was little, my parents took me to a local marine park. A highlight of the trip was watching the dolphins’ performance. I excitedly watched as these beautiful animals performed amazing tricks on command from their trainer. I was captivated by the dolphins’ power, grace and intelligence.
This was the greatest show I had ever witnessed and the memories of that afternoon would not soon leave my imagination.
Click on images for a larger view.
Years later, I returned to SeaWorld with my own child. I wanted her imagination to be fired up, just as mine had, by the sight of these wonderful animals. The show that my daughter and I witnessed that day was pretty much the same show that I had seen years earlier as a child. The dolphins still swam at breakneck speed as they raced around their tank; they still jumped high in the air to catch objects tossed by their handlers. Just like when I was a child, the sight of the powerful and graceful dolphins captivated both my daughter and me. By the time that the show ended, I was certain that the dolphins had left the same indelible mark in her young mind as they had left in mine.
Then something completely unexpected happened.
As we left the show arena, we walked past a large tank where dolphins, who were not performers in the show, were kept. Park visitors were allowed to feed and pet the dolphins in the tank.
My daughter asked for money to buy dolphin “treats” (a small plastic bucket filled with mackerel) so she could feed and pet the dolphins in the tank. I gladly gave her the money and then watched ,with parental pride, as my child bravely walked up to the tank’s edge, reached in and began to feed and pet the dolphins who like hungry puppies, came to the side of the tank. After emptying the little bucket, my daughter came back to me and with a sad look on her bright eyes asked to go home.
I was confused by her reaction. Instead of seeing a gleeful, happy child face, my daughter looked sad and crestfallen. I held her small hand and together we walked out the park. As we neared the exit, I asked her if she was OK, and she said she was. I knew that things were not OK, but I also knew better than to press the issue. So we got into the car and headed home.
That night, over dinner, my daughter asked me why the dolphins were unhappy. Her question surprised me. To me, and to most casual observers, the dolphins performing at Sea World (and other marine park) seemed happy, well kept and generously rewarded for performing behaviors that come naturally to them in the wild.
I asked my daughter to explain what she meant. She told me that while she was feeding and petting the dolphins, an “old” dolphin (I have no idea how she knew it was an “old” dolphin) came up to her and after taking a nibble from the mackerel that my daughter offered him, he “told” her that he hated being made to perform. She went to say that the “old” dolphin told her that he was tired of being kept in that small tank and that he, and his pod mates, wanted to go back to live in the in the ocean, less than a kilometer away from their enclosure.
I did not know what to do or say. I’ve always known that my daughter has a very vivid imagination. So I was pretty sure that this whole dolphin “conversation” was just a “story” that she had made up.
On the other hand, however, I have always known my child to be bright and very sensitive to the environment around her. There had to be more to this dolphin story that the mere imaginings of a child. I could still remember the sad look on her face as she walked away from the dolphin enclosure. So I became convinced that something more than a child’s imagination at play had occurred while she fed and petted the dolphins.
I asked her if the dolphin had actually “talked” to her. She smiled and said, “Don’t be silly mom, dolphins can’t talk.” So I asked her just how she knew that the dolphin was sad and tired of being kept in that tank.
“He told me with his eyes Mom.” Then she added, “And I felt it when I touched him.”
That is when I had my “Aha!” moment.
Many years earlier, when I was a little girl, my parents took me to see the circus. Before the show began, circus visitors were allowed to walk back to the area where the circus’ animals were kept. I was scared of the bears and lions, so I did not get too close to their cages. I loved the horses and I got close enough to touch them and feed them hay. But when I approached the elephants, I began to cry and asked my dad to take me home.
He assumed that the big elephants were too scary for me. I told him that I was not scared of the elephants. Then my dad asked me what the problem was. I told him, “the elephants are sad and they don’t want to be kept in chains.” My dad was taken aback by my answer. He still thought that I was making up an excuse for being scared. But I told him again, “The elephants are sad and they want to go back home.”
“Young lady,” my dad sternly asked in his heavily accented voice, “Just how do you know that the elephants are sad and want to go back home.”
“I saw it in the ‘mommy’ elephant’s eyes,” I said to my Dad, “she told me with her eyes.”
DUMBO AND HIS MOMMY
Flash forward a few dozen years.
I am fortunate enough to live close to the ocean. Many of my regular bike rides include long stretches of California’s Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). During those rides (and during other trips to the beach) I have had the opportunity to observe dolphins swimming just beyond the surf line. Sometimes a whole pod, made up of a few adults and a bunch of “kids” get close enough to the local surfers. It is an awesome sight to watch these curious and intelligent creatures out on their own element. They chase each other, they ride the waves and sometimes they even get amorous with one another.
I have posted many photos in this blog showing depicting the “Malibu” dolphins at play. Life in the “real world” can be rough and far from idyllic for the dolphins and the other creatures who live in the wild. (Over the years, I have seen a few dolphin carcasses wash ashore. These carcasses often bear witness to a deadly encounter with a bigger animal or with the propellers of a boat.) But thinking back to my daughter’s encounter with the sad SeaWorld dolphin, I am convinced that life out on the open ocean has to be infinitely better than life in captivity.
This brings me (finally some of you may say) to the point of this article. There is a town in Japan where every year a handful of Japanese hunters pursue, trap and then mercilessly club to death hundreds of dolphins – the very brothers and sisters of the dolphins who swim right off PCH.
Dolphin hunting season arrives every October, like clockwork, to a sleepy harbor town in Japan. The town of Taiji is located at the tip of the Kii peninsula, south of Kyoto. By the end of March, six months later, more than 3,000 small whales and striped, bottlenose and spotted dolphins have been slaughtered for meat that ends up on the tables of local homes and restaurants and in vacuum-packed bags in supermarkets. According to environmentalists, this is probably the single, largest annual cull of cetaceans – about 26,000 year-round around coastal Japan - in the world.
Taiji is located approximately six hours from Tokyo and is accessible only via a coastal road that snakes through tunnels that cut through dense, pine-carpeted mountains. For years, Taiji escaped the prying eyes of animal rights activists. That “blissful” isolation, however, has been abruptly ended by the Internet.
The dolphin hunts are notoriously brutal. Local dolphin hunters erect blue tarpaulin sheets to block the main viewing spots overlooking the cove where the killings take place to prevent picture taking. The hunt starts just outside the cove, where a small fleet of hunting boats surrounds a pod of migrating dolphins. The hunters then lower metal poles into the sea and bang them to frighten the animals and to disrupt their sonar. Once the panicking, thrashing dolphins are herded into the narrow cove, the hunters attack them with knives, turning the sea bloody red before dragging the wounded and dying animals to a harbor-side warehouse where the surviving dolphins are slaughtered.
WARNING: These are extremely graphic and gruesome video clips. Do not play them if you are disturbed by images of violence, especially violence against defenseless animals.
A few dolphins are spared the club and the knife. These “lucky” ones are sold to marine parks all over the world. A live dolphin can command prices of over $150,000.00 per dolphin.
Fueled by gruesome videos of the dolphin kill posted on YouTube, tensions between animal-right protesters and the local Taiji dolphin hunters have grown. The best known of these protesters is Ric O’Barry. O’Barry once trained dolphins for the 1960’s TV series ‘Flipper.’ He has now, however, joined the fight against the dolphin hunt. In fact, Rick now encourages people to boycott marine parks featuring captive dolphins. (More about that later.)
O’ Barry is one of the world’s best-known environmentalists. A former US Navy diver, he later trained the five dolphins that played ‘Flipper’ in the hit 1960’s TV series. In 1970, O’Barry turned against dolphin captivity. He has spent his life since as an animal rights campaigner fighting what he calls the ‘secret genocide’ of dolphins by the dolphin hunters from Taiji.
Clip from the documentary, THE COVE, produced by Mr. O’Barry’s foundation. The documentary is out on limited release.
In an interviewed conducted by David McNeill, a writer for the London Independent and other publications, O’Barry was asked why he opposes the use of captive dolphins. This is what O’Barry had to say:
“I captured about 100 dolphins myself, back in the 1960s, including the five that played Flipper. I was the highest-paid animal trainer in the world. If I wanted I could set up one of these dolphin training programs and make 3-4 million dollars a year.”
O’Barry went on. “I changed when Flipper died in my arms from suicide. I use that word with some trepidation but I don’t know another word that describes self-induced asphyxiation. Dolphins and other whales are not automatic breathers. Every breath that they take is a conscious effort, which is why they don’t sleep. If life becomes miserable, they just don’t take the next breath. Flipper looked me in the eye and stopped breathing.”
He then concluded by stating. “In those days I was as ignorant as I could be. Now I am against captivity. It has no socially redeeming feature. It is not educational. How come I can’t find one person among the millions who have visited the 50 dolphin facilities in Japan who is against this industry? I organize a worldwide protest outside consulates every year and the only city where I can’t get a protest going is Tokyo. So what is the value of having dolphins on display if it doesn’t sensitize people? It is just casual amusement. It is a form of bad education that serves to perpetuate our utilitarian relationship with nature.
“Flipper was the best and the worst thing that ever happened to dolphins. It exposed the world to dolphins but it also created these captors and the desire to hug them and kiss them and love them to death. Dolphins hate captivity. You’ll see them in the Taiji Whale Museum with their head lying up against the tank, saying ‘how do I get out of here.’ Do I feel responsibility? I have trouble sometimes sleeping at night. Guilt is not too strong a word. I’m not motivated by guilt, although I used to be. Now this is who I am: I eat, sleep and live this life and won’t stop this campaigning until I draw my last breath.”
Posted at Japan Focus on January 2, 2007.
O’Barry’s statements to Mr. McNeill brought back the words that my own daughter had so eloquently spoken when she was just a little girl: “The dolphins hate to be kept prisoners and they want out.”
O’Barry’s words also confirmed, as if I needed confirmation, what I had seen and felt that day in the circus, when I looked into the elephant’s deep, dark eyes: “We hate being here, we hate being in chains.”
O’Barry created and maintains a website from where he advocates on behalf of the dolphin and against the hunting of these creatures.
For more information about O’Barry’s work and you can do to help end the needless and cruel dolphin hunt, please click here:
Save Japan Dolphins
O’Barry website offers suggestions for things that we can all do to help the fight. We can sign an electronic petition to go to President Barack Obama and to the Japanese government. We can sign petitions to go to the worldwide head of marine-park operations. We can boycott marine parks offering dolphin and whale shows. We can donate money (if you wish). We can help spread the message to others who may not be aware of man’s inhumanity towards the dolphin.
We can do many things as a community. SecondLife bills itself as the largest interactive community in the world. That means that our message can effectively reach vast audiences in SL and outside SL. We have the power to better the lives of animals, including the wolf and the dolphin.
To paraphrase the words of the famous Irish writer and philosopher George Bernard Shaw (later quoted in a speech by the late Robert F. Kennedy).
Some men see things as they are and ask, WHY?
I dream of things that have never been and ask, WHY NOT?
This is our “why not?” moment. Don’t let it slip by.
Click the links below for suggestions on things to do:
Send a message to President Obama and Vice-president Biden:
Petition the U.S. President
Pledge not to go and see dolphins in captivity:
Boycott dolphins in captivity
Donate money to help the fight to end the destruction of dolphins:
Donate money to the cause
Petition for an end to captive dolphin shows:
Help end dolphin captivity
Go and see THE COVE (or buy the DVD):
Go see THE COVE
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing written in this article is meant to, either explicitly or impliedly, foment hatred or prejudice against the Japanese people. It is my opinion, an opinion shared by others, including Mr. O’Barry, that education of the Japanese people on this issue (rather than condemnation) will in the end be more effective.
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