I was driving to work obsessed with health care reform, and heard Terri Gross interview the director and key figure from The Cove, a new documentary about the slaughter of dolphins. It opens nationwide tomorrow.
I wept, openly as I heard the interview and clips from the film.
Although there have been two diaries (here and here) about this, they fail for me to capture the essence of this interview: Ric O'Barry, who trained the dolphins in the 60s TV show Flipper, has become a crusader for dolphins, and instigated this documentary to try to stop a ``killing fields'' for dolphins in rural Japan. The interview and movie touch upon much bigger issues than just this seaside village in Japan - our choices in tourism, overfishing of the oceans, pollution of our environment, and, of course, the anthropocentric world view.
More below the fold.
The basic fact at the core of the movie is this: at a cove, which is locked behind high fences topped by razor tipped barbed wire in a remote Japanese village, rumors have circulated for years about the slaughter of dolphins in the process of capturing dolphins for aquariums or resorts (swimming with dolphins). This dolphin capture takes place over a period from September to April, and trainers from the aquariums and resorts will audition the dolphins, while trapped in the cove, for suitability in their shows/swimming with dolphin pools.
The village, and presumably the Japanese government--the cove is in a national park--deny the slaughter rumors. O'Barry has individually witnessed them but wants to prove this by capturing a slaughter on film. He has recruited National Geographic film-making veteran Louie Psihoyos to make the documentary, and a skilled diver to place cameras camouflaged by Industrial Light and Magic built rocks under the water to film an actual slaughter.
O'Barry flipped from being dolphin trainer to dolphin crusader in the sixties when one of the female dolphins - Cathy - who played Flipper died in his arms. In his opinion, she committed suicide by shutting off her breathing, after weeks of depressed behavior where she lay at the surface against a wall. O'Barry has seen this behavior in aquariums and the cove over the years, and says an orca at the Miami Seaquarium behaves this way between shows which is why they hustle you out.
Now, before you flip out about Seaworld, say, you should know that thanks to O'Barry and Earth Island Institute, the Clinton administration put a ban - that still holds - on US based resorts or aquariums from taking dolphins from the cove in the mid 90s.
How do the dolphins get into the cove? The fishermen go out to sea just past the migratory routes and herd them to the cove by inserting pipes on the water with amplifying flanges at the ends that they then bang mercilessly over a period of hours or days to bring dolphins in. The dolpins are of course exquisitely sensitive to noise and the clanging of the pipes terrifies them. Once herded into the cove, they trap them by net and leave them for the trainers to come and `audition' them for their lives as entertainers for humans. The best behaved, the least blemished, they are taken by the trainers. Once the trainers leave, the fishermen slaughter the remaining dolphins.
Why? Why the slaughter? O'Barry tried before the film to offer a subsidy equal to the earnings of the fishermen from selling the dolphin meat to stores in Japan and live dolphins to aquariums and resorts. They refused, because they viewed the slaughter as pest control: the primary bread and butter work of the village is fishing, and the fisherman view the dolphins as competitors for the overfished seas they make their living from.
O'Barry does not blame the fisherman in this as much as the trainers, because as he points out they view the dolphins as fish, it is their culture entirely and the word for dolphins and whales in Japan translates to monster fish. The trainers of course know better.
What of the meat? It is too toxic to be eaten by humans, as the process of bioamplification of toxins up the food chain makes the meat loaded with high quantities of mercury.
O'Barry notes near the end of the interview that dolphins are the only creatures in the wild who will save divers in danger. This is of a piece with the recent New York Times Magazine article about `Watching whales watching us', which discusses the approaches to naturalist boats by grey whales in a birthing region of the Sea of Cortez where whalers and Mitsubishi Corp have in the past taken many, many whales. The subtext of the article is that these singing, sentient beings are trying to tell us something, and learn about us as we learn about them, and that even in a region where they have been slaughtered they will approach us with an open mind.
I close with a plea to donate to Earth Island for their long term, excellent work in this area, and a poem by Mary Oliver about humpbacks whales:
Humpbacks
There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.
You know what I mean.
The sky, after all, stops at nothing so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.
Off Stellwagan
off the Cape,
the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.
They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.
Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.
We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash through the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky —
like nothing you’ve ever imagined —
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then
they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.
I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.
I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.
I know several lives worth living.
Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.
Let us remember our place in the world, one more species trying to get along.