Ric O’Barry has worked both sides of the dolphin street, the first 10 years with the dolphin captivity industry (as the trainer of Flipper), and the past 38 against it. When Kathy, the dolphin who played Flipper most of the time, died in his arms he realized that capturing dolphins and training them to perform silly tricks was simply wrong. More recently he was the motivating force behind “The Cove,” the documentary that showed to the world the horrific slaughter of dolphins that goes on in a quiet corner of Japan. No one is more qualified to call for the end of dolphins living in captivity as circus performers. An excerpt from, OCEANS, The Threats To Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide.
When you consider that dolphins and other whales have been on this planet for at least 50 million years, compared with much less than a single million years for us human beings, you have to wonder how we got control over them so quickly. They have larger brains than we have. They’re bigger and stronger, faster, sleeker and altogether more perfectly formed than we are. And yet, just as we have come to dominate the thirty percent of the planet which is not water it is easy to argue that dolphins and whales are the dominant species in the other seventy percent, in the water world.
We are actually very much alike. We’re both mammals of a high order, both self-aware, both breathe air and both have adapted almost perfectly to the world we live in. We both have mothers that suckle their young in loving family groups around which is woven a way of living that fosters social rules maintaining a balance like the golden mean of ancient Greece.
That last is at least true of dolphins and other whales.
Where did we go wrong? What happened in our world to make so many of us rush with such abandon into the exploitation of our counterparts in the watery seventy percent of the world? Why do we capture these beautiful fellow creatures and make them objects of fun? And oddly enough the most fun we seem to have is capturing them, pinning them up and making them pull us through the water, one after the other. Why would anyone who understood what was actually going on enjoy this? How can we, who do understand what’s going on, tolerate it? And how can those who exploit dolphins and other whales do so without a ripple of conscience, as if they had a right to?
The short answer is that we have a long history of doing just this. After all, human slavery was only recently put aside as an okay thing to do (in part when it was no longer economically feasible). Indeed where it is still feasible today, as in enforced prostitution of children, it continues. Maybe at the heart of this attitude is our sophisticated worldwide economic system whose goal is to maximize profits regardless of collateral damage. But the history of slavery in general is a clue to how we can stop this travesty. If we stop it from being profitable, it will go away.
The first so-called dolphinarium opened in 1938 at Marine Studios in St. Augustine, Florida, where captured dolphins perform tricks several times a day for paying humans. Today there are scores of them all over the world, with more in the works. If you could collect all the abuse to dolphins — the pain, the horror, frustration, the suicides, the cries for help – the accumulated atrocities would equal a thousand hells.
Most countries would not permit this abuse except for one reason: Money. Most countries have laws against cruelty to animals, first adopted in the early nineteenth century. But these laws obviously have loopholes because, despite all our efforts, displaying dolphins publicly for money is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Many participate, and profit: Hunters, suppliers and shippers of dolphins, marketers, park construction workers, trainers, the list goes on. Some nations allow it because they’ve got bigger problems. Some nations see nothing wrong with it. The rest allow it for the wrong reason, suggesting that it’s “educational.” Those who suggest dolphinaria are educational argue that many people would otherwise never get to see a dolphin. But what about all the people who will never see a snow leopard? A saber-toothed tiger? Or the dodo? Their argument is a fraud, because these dolphinaria are not educational, they’re anti-educational. They show not a dolphin in his own world but a dolphin trained to act like a clown in our world. And then they have the unmitigated gall to tell us, “Look! See how they smile? They love doing tricks for us!”
Don’t be fooled. Those dolphins are not smiling. If one of those same performing dolphins were to fall dead on the dock, he would still wear that look and it would still not be a smile.
Some may argue that we are not personally to blame for what is happening to dolphins and other whales around the world. And that’s true. We don’t personally capture them and put them in what to them are tiny torture chambers. We don’t withhold food till they perform silly little acrobatic tricks to our liking. We’re not to blame, not a single one of us, in the same way we’re not personally to blame for the world’s murders, arsons, and kidnappings. Over the years we have passed laws against murder and kidnapping not because of some abstraction about society or the rule of law, but because we’re sick of them. Similarly those who capture dolphins in the wild and imprison them for the rest of their lives now revolt us.
(Letting them breed in captivity and citing that as “freedom” doesn’t wash either; dolphins born in captivity never learn to catch a live fish in the wild and are unequipped to live there.)
A lot of misguided talk surrounds another similarity between human beings and dolphins in captivity: Committing suicide when stressed. When dolphins in captivity are greatly stressed, they sometimes obviously feel the need to escape by whatever means. This is a big problem because they don’t have guns or poison as we do in such circumstances. What can they do? Some will batter themselves to death against the walls of their prison. Others refuse to eat until they waste away and die. While humans and all the other mammals breathe automatically, dolphins don’t have that automatic reflex; every breath they take is deliberate. When human beings fall into deep water, we drown because we lose consciousness and then, when the automatic reflex kicks in, we breathe water. Not so the dolphin. The dolphin will kill himself by drowning if he deliberately breathes water, but more likely he dies for lack of oxygen in his blood caused by not breathing at all. This suicide option the dolphin takes is another proof of his self-awareness, without which suicide would never even occur to him
If words, logic, reason, facts and history were enough to destroy this dolphin industry, it would have disappeared by now. Now we need laws to stop it. It cannot be done overnight and may take many years. But now is the time to start eliminating this evil or it will endure through our lifetime.
I’ve written about the garbage patch swirling around the North Pacific a dozen times. It’s big (the size of Texas?) and growing; now it’s clear that it is not alone, that there are other gyres, in other parts of the ocean. Anna Cummins is leading a project called 5 Gyres and an interview with her at SmartPlanet.com details where they are and how they’re growing.
What are the 5 gyres and why do we need to know about them?
An oceanic gyre is a slow rotating system of currents — massive marine eddies created by wind patterns and the Earth’s rotational forces. Oceanic gyres have come to the public attention due to their ability to transport and accumulate marine debris. In the last decade, Captain [Charles] Moore and the Algalita Marine Research Foundation have documented an alarming amount of plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre, between California and Hawaii. Plastic trash that washes from land in the Pacific Rim countries gets swept up in the gyre’s currents, breaking down into smaller pieces through photodegradation. Plastic debris can harm marine wildlife through entanglement or ingestion. Current research focuses on the potential human health impacts of this plastic trash, as plastic particles laden with toxic chemicals are eaten by fish, and enter the food chain.
Many have now heard of plastic trash in the North Pacific, due to more media about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
Few realize that there are five subtropical gyres in the world — the North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean . Little is known about plastic pollution in the four other gyres. To address this, our project is conducting research on these lesser known gyres, bringing the issue of plastic pollution to a global audience.
What research does your team do?
We research the accumulation of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. This year, we completed two research expeditions across the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean gyres, collecting samples of the ocean’s surface. Our research partner analyzes our samples in a lab, measuring the weight and the type of plastic collected, as well as dissecting small fish to study potential plastic ingestion. We have eight expeditions planned for 2010 and 2011, to the South Atlantic and South Pacific gyres. We will collect surface samples to study plastic accumulation, and fish to study potential biochemical impacts. The question being asked by the public now: are fish that eat plastic particles also absorbing chemicals from this plastic into their tissue? If so, are these chemicals working their way up the food chain? We hope to explore this question further.
Who works on the project?
Our team is made up of scientists, journalists, educators and filmmakers. We offer space to interested crew representing many different public sectors. It is important to have both scientists and non-scientists involved to ensure that our message gets out to a wide audience.
Why is this work important?
We have now crossed three oceans — the North Pacific, North Atlantic and Indian Ocean — and we’ve seen plastic pollution in all three. Plastics have been around for less than 100 years, yet we now find them covering shorelines and ocean surfaces around the world. Far from being simply an aesthetic issue, this plastic pollution poses threats to marine wildlife that ingest or become entangled in plastic. And we’re now finding plastic in fish that humans eat. We must begin addressing this issue on land, by changing the way we use and dispose of plastics.
What’s the goal of the project?
Our goal is to reach a much wider audience with our research, bringing the issue of plastic pollution to international attention and continuing to explore the unknown questions about plastic debris: what is the ultimate fate of plastic debris? What is the density of plastic pollution in the other gyres? And are pollutants from plastic entering the food chain through foraging fish? With our research, we also hope to encourage changes in the way we produce, manufacture, consume and recycle our plastics. Once we collect our data, we will conduct a cycling and speaking tour across the East Coast and Europe.
What challenges do you face?
Research expeditions are expensive, and finding funding for research can be difficult. Another challenge is coming up with realistic, immediate solutions to the plastic pollution issue. Changing policies that govern the way we make and use plastics will take time and public involvement. We also need to work on improving waste infrastructures of many less developed countries. Many countries are not yet equipped to deal with plastics effectively — so plastic trash is often burned or tossed. Finally, a big picture challenge in developed countries is shifting from our throwaway, consumer culture. In addition to changing the material, and recyclability of plastic, we need to consume less “stuff” altogether.
We are in the process of finishing a big, beautiful, provocative film about Southern Louisiana, focused on the relationship between man and the sea … so obviously when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, inflamed, sank and now continues to pump oil into the Gulf of Mexico we are watching with a vested interest. (In our film – Sola, Louisiana Water Stories – current Governor Bobby Jindal is on camera telling an interviewer that one of the “beauties” of Louisiana is that are no oil spills ….)
One of the conservation activists we profile in the film, Tracy Kuhns, is the Louisiana Bayoukeeper – affiliated with the international Waterkeeper Alliance – as well as running the Fishing Community Family Support Center. Her husband, Michael Roberts, is a fisherman and they live on Bayou Barataria where fishing is down for multiple reasons, one being the waste left behind by oil and gas explorations and takings going back many decades.
A shrimper on his way home at day's end, up Bayou Lafourche. Photo: Fiona Stewart
I asked her for her take on the still-growing oil spill in the Gulf, now spreading through Louisiana’s fertile fishing grounds (40 percent of the US.’s seafood comes from the Gulf of Mexico):
Tracy Kuhns: “As a resident of one of Louisiana’s many coastal fishing communities, I am very worried and saddened, right now, about the massive, on going, oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The media, government agencies and naturally, the environmental community seem so wrapped up with the oil they can see on the surface, it’s as if, that is all there is to the spill. While dealing with what is seen on the surface if urgent and extremely important to minimizing damage to our estuaries, our fishermen know from experience, with inland and other offshore oil spills, that what is on the surface is nothing compared to what will cover the water bottom and can not be seen. They know that after everyone proclaims the clean up to be complete and the fishermen go back fishing, their nets will come up covered in oil tar and that they will not be able to fish, in the area of the spill, for years to come. A complete clean up never happens, so this oil spill is bound to have long term impacts on the Gulf of Mexico and Inland fisheries for years to come, (Approx. 90% of Gulf Marine Species spend some portion of their life cycle in our estuaries). What will it take for us to learn that oil and gas are not worth the long term costs to the environment, communities and the people of the Gulf Coast? Why do we accept coastal destruction and erosion, oilfield debris, oil and gas explosions, spills and pollution as a necessary trade for jobs? Why are we willing to trade sustainable local seafood, tourism and recreational jobs for destructive, polluting ones? When will our legislators begin to move towards bringing us jobs from clean energy development (solar, etc), rather then hanging on to the past and continuing to support social and environmental destruction in the name of the economy? Jobs that promote sustainable, local small businesses and communities rather then pushing forward with industrialization of seafood production, which will cause further environmental destruction, fish population decline, and the collapse of local coastal community economies. Have we not learned anything from the industrialization of our farming communities and the resulting environmental and social destruction? Dead Zone in the Gulf and the loss of family farms and communities. Jobs where we produce and build what we need, locally, rather then importing it from elsewhere. When will those, who claim to serve the people, stand up for us, our communities and our natural resources, rather then corporate interests and environmental and social devastation?”
Good questions. Any comments?
Senior scientist with Humane Society International, Naomi Rose oversees campaigns to protect wild and captive marine animals. She is also a member of the International Whaling Commission’s Scientific Committee, Her concern for whales and dolphins comes from her transition from field work to desk work. Given recent suggested changes in who can hunt whales when and where, Naomi’s expertise is much in need. An excerpt from our new book, OCEANS, The Threats to the Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide.
Almost twenty-five years ago, a Ph.D. student at the University of California in Santa Cruz, I spent five summers camping on an uninhabited island and bobbing around in a small rubber inflatable boat following the ins and outs of the lives of a pod of killer whales, or orcas, in the waters off British Columbia. These were the Northern Resident orcas, which spend their summers in the Inside Passage of Vancouver Island, particularly in Johnstone Strait. I was interested in the social dynamics of the males, who stay by their mother’s side for life in this population, yet somehow still manage to father offspring outside of the family.
When I was studying these whales, researchers had been taking their photographs – by which these dramatic black and white animals are easily identified – for about 15 years, following individuals year after year. Using actuarial techniques similar to those used by insurance companies, they had determined that the females in this population were, in the words of one scientist, “immortal.”
Obviously this was a bit of an exaggeration, but the fact is that by the mid-1980s, after having followed these individuals since 1973, orca researchers had observed the loss of very few prime-age adult females. Juveniles of both sexes faced many risks and adult males seemed prone to any number of mid-life health crises. However, if a young female managed to make it into adulthood – past the age of 15, more or less, which is when the average female orca starts bearing calves – she was almost certain to live into her sixties, seventies or eighties.
All of that changed in the 1990s.
The change may have simply been a matter of probability. Perhaps in such a long-lived species, fifteen years wasn’t really long enough to gather enough representative data and the seeming immortality of adult females was just what statisticians call an “artifact” of a small sample size (in this case, the small number of years the animals had been followed). Maybe after ten more years of data collection, the dataset was giving a more accurate picture of orca lives. Maybe it was normal after all for a fair number of females to die in their twenties, thirties or forties.
However, other research was showing that deaths, of all sex and age classes of orcas, increased in years with bad Chinook salmon runs. The orcas of British Columbia aren’t marine mammal hunters, but rather specialize in feasting on salmon. And not just any salmon – they are very picky and love the prized Chinook or king salmon. In the 1990s, due to a host of mostly human-caused factors, there had been a number of poor salmon runs. In these years a larger number than usual of Northern Resident orcas were dying, including adult females who should have been in the prime of their lives.
I was shocked when I heard this news, not having been back to British Columbia in almost a decade. The orcas of Johnstone Strait had been frozen in time in my memory, hale, hearty and thriving. It was appalling to hear that the “immortal” females of my graduate career were dying, at the height of their reproductive years, sometimes with a dependent calf left behind to starve. Many of these females had been the sisters and mothers of the males I had studied for my dissertation research, animals I knew on sight, who had names and personalities and histories. And they were dying not in the natural course of things but because human beings were causing the degradation of their habitat (and that of their salmon prey), polluting their bodies with toxins, and over-exploiting the fish on which they depend.
Tierney Thys is one of the world’s experts on the Mola-mola, the giant ocean sunfish. But her love, understanding of, and curiosity about the importance of all fishes is boundless. An excerpt from her essay for our new book, OCEANS, The Threats to the Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
What is it about fish?
I’ve revered them ever since I met my first goldfish named Lucky. I was six years old and a member of my community swim team. Each year, the team hosted a crazy event marking the end of swim season. First, the coaches would purchase hundreds of unsuspecting goldfish. Next, they’d dump them into our heavily chlorinated community pool. Then they’d raise a starter’s gun and yell, “Swimmers to your marks! Get set! BANG!” The gun would fire and the screaming hordes, including me, would plunge into the pool to capture as many poor fish as we could with Ziploc baggies. After a few minutes, the novelty would wear off, and we’d haul ourselves out, having transformed the pool into a confetti broth of sparkling scales and belly-up bodies. It was during one of these insane events that I found Lucky.
The community center stopped this practice years ago. Too many fish died too quickly. If the chlorine didn’t get them, the rough handling did. But Lucky turned out to be rather hardy, living for many years in a little tank where I could watch his liquid-gold antics play out for hours. I’d daydream that I possessed his seamless swimming skills, and could breath underwater just like him.
Three decades later, standing before the Outer Bay tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I gaze at massive bluefin tuna. For most visitors, tuna simply exist as oily chunks of meat stuffed into a can or splayed atop white rice. Catching a full-bodied glimpse of these living, muscle-bound torpedoes makes for a breath-taking experience. Something almost sacred happens when you enter this area of the Aquarium. It’s dark, cozy with a quiet, planetary power. Even amidst hordes of other visitors, you can almost feel what it must be like to an element of the sea . . . to be a powerful, sleek fish.
Fish impress in myriad ways. In size range they span from fingernail size gobies to school-bus sized whale sharks. As masters of adaptation, they can live in nearly any body of water, be it scalding sulfurous vents or ice-bound polar seas. Their sex, spawning and parenting habits are unmatched; from being male and female simultaneously like surfperch; to giving birth to live young like great white sharks, to releasing 300 million eggs like ocean sunfish or even mouth-brooding like African cichlids. Evolutionarily, fish occupied Earth far longer that we have, sporting a history dating back to the dawn of complex animal life, half a billion years ago. From that first piscine Eve descended one bold fleshy-finned group that stepped onto land and transformed into sentient beings. These same beings would ultimately acquire the ability to scribble love notes, drag bottom trawlers, cinch up purse-seines, and witness once teeming seas drain of life.
At the Aquarium, I watch as my children press their hands and faces to the tank hoping not to miss a single tail beat. This tank thrums with activity, and if you didn’t know better, you could trick yourself into thinking it a perfect proxy for the wild ocean crashing just outside the walls. Here, every inch of blue is alive with big healthy life. Out there, in the concertina sea, the tune is different.
We’ve perpetrated oceanic felonies many times over, decimating so many big commercial fish stocks like Atlantic swordfish and bluefin tuna that even if we stopped all fishing today, populations would still take decades to rebuild, if ever. And with fewer fish, lower-energy organisms like jellies and bacteria can bloom in great numbers and gain strongholds on the sea. Not the most appetizing of scenarios.
As grim as it may seem, however, we are making some progress. According to renowned social anthropologist, Stephen Pinker, human society is growing increasingly pacifist, relying less on violence to solve our problems. We are starting to create stronger protocols for conducting non-human animal research and recognizing that fish do indeed feel pain. Steadily and measurably, we are extending our circle of compassion to the life in the sea.
In the big picture, caring for this life in the sea may in fact make us happier people. Positive psychologists argue that four distinct things contribute to deep happiness: 1) satisfying work; 2) being good at something, 3) spending time with people we like, and 4) having the chance to be a part of something. By making wise seafood choices; taking responsibility for our garbage including CO2 and by getting involved to make our voices heard, we can find satisfying work that we are all good at doing. In saving the fishes, we can all become part of something enormously important. And if we do it together, we will, by default, be spending time with people we like.
In my case, that means spending time with my family. Back at the Aquarium, my four-year old daughter turns to me and with those big sea-green eyes of hers, she asks, “Mamma, what’s it like to be a fish?” Before I can utter a word, she turns back to the tank and whispers to the glass, “I wanna be a fish. Fish live in the best place in the world!”
How deeply I want that to be true—down to the very saltwater in every one of my cells.
On Sunday, in rough seas fifty miles off the coast of Louisiana, robotic submarines were sent down a mile down below the Gulf’s stormy surface to try and cap the sunken oil well, which is leaking crude at a minimum rate of 1,000 barrels a day, or 42,000 gallons a day. (By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill was 11 million gallons.) Why the rig exploded last Tuesday has not been confirmed; it’s also unspoken what happened to the 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board the 400-foot-by-300-foot rig.
What was initially dismissed (by company officials) as an easy-to-clean-up slick has now spread a sheen covering twenty miles by twenty miles and dependent on wind and currents could be headed for the U.S. coastline from Louisiana to Florida. Efforts to clean up the oil slick, using booms and vacuums, were stopped on Sunday due to high winds, rains and 8-to-10-foot seas. For my full report, see The Current at TakePart.com.
Post A Comment
