DOLPHIN BLOOD RUNS DEEP IN THE COVE
Richard O’Barry made the adorable bottlenose dolphin a focus of worldwide awe in the television series Flipper (1964-1968). As he trained the five dolphins known as Flipper, he learned of their beauty, intelligence, and sensitivity, but not until after ten years, when one died by suicide in his hands, did he realize the cruelty of keeping a dolphin in captivity. He then decided to liberate dolphins everywhere, as he has for the past thirty-five years. But by then dolphin shows had become a multibillion dollar business. On several occasions, he was arrested. Among those who joined his crusade, two even died. For many years dolphins were herded at Iki, Japan, to be sold for as much as $150,000 apiece, while the rest caught in the net were individually slaughtered. Eventually, dolphins stopped swimming offshore from Iki, and the dolphin business moved to Taiji, where 23,000 are slaughtered each year from September to March. When O’Barry heard about the killing cove at Taiji (near Osaka), he visited. But his notoriety meant that he alone would be checkmated by the police or others involved in the lucrative trade. He therefore recruited divers and other activists to plot to film the slaughter first hand. The result is the docujournalist film The Cove, in the spirit of the genre that originated with Michael Moore’s Political Film Society awardwinner Roger & Me (1989). The film not only focuses on the obstacles overcome in capturing the slaughter on film but also on the politics behind the industry. One peril that O’Barry and his crew had to overcome was police surveillance, and he notes that anyone in Japan can be arrested on any pretext and held for a maximum of 28 days, though 98 percent of those confined plead guilty before the four-week incarceration because they cannot endure the torture. A milder obstacle is surveillance by plainclothes police as well as in-your-face and body blocking of his crew on paths leading to the sea by participants in the deadly trade. O’Barry places the dolphin slaughter in the larger context of the International Whaling Commission, which banned whale hunting except for “scientific purposes” as of 1986 but did not prohibit commercial harvesting of dolphins as mere “small cetaceans.” Each year, Japan seeks to overcome the ban by pouring money into the economy of African, Caribbean, and Pacific Island countries in order to gain votes (though 75 percent of the members must agree). Japan seeks to sustain the dolphin slaughter and to overturn the ban on whales by arguments that are refuted in the film: (1) The denial that dolphins are massively slaughtered is, of course, exposed as false in the film. (2) The argument that the public needs dolphin meat is countered with scientific evidence that dolphin meat contains 250 times more toxic mercury than Japan health authorities allow, and credits at the end indicate that two members of the Taiji City Council managed to ban the free distribution of meat to schoolchildren from the dolphin slaughter in order to protect their sons and daughters from a fate similar to that of the victims of Minimata disease. (3) Japan’s argument that voracious edible whales are responsible for the decrease of fish stocks in the oceans and must be killed as a “pest control” imperative is refuted by pointing out that human overfishing, the main culprit, is predicted to eliminate all fish stocks by the late century, thereby creating a serious famine, as 70 percent of the world’s population depends on seafood for protein. (4) The claim that the killing is without pain is belied by the documentary footage. (5) The argument that dolphin food is part of Japanese culture is refuted by interviews of Tokyoites who are shocked by the practice and consider dolphin food low class. The Political Film Society has nominated The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos, for best film exposé in regard to the slaughter and best film on human rights in regard to Japan’s deviations from well-recognized juridical standards. Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer, felt compelled to make the film after finding out why O’Barry was suddenly dropped as a speaker from a marine mammal conference in San Diego during 2000. MH