TRUTH AND LIES
The Cove is a 2009 film about dolphin activist Ric O’Barry and his exposé of dolphinariums and the dolphin drive hunts in Japan. He makes the claim that all dolphins have bad lives in "captivity" and that all dolphins come from the slaughter in Japan.
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He also claims that the dolphinariums are the reason for the drive hunts, and subsequent killing: meaning that if we would just stop going to dolphinariums and shows, the slaughter would stop forever. He then goes through, in a couple of brief sentences, how he offered the fishermen money to not kill the dolphins, but they said no, it’s not about money, but about “pest control”. This was however very much downplayed in the film, to put all focus on “the slaughter exists to get dolphins for dolphinariums”.
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Like so many others who watched this film, I swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. But as we all know, yet often forget, you're not supposed to believe everything you see on TV, and this is one of those times.
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While dolphins and whales have always been more controversial that most other animals kept in zoos*, it reached new heights after The Cove and Blackfish, with new "converts" who know nothing, think they know everything, and make sure to tell everyone online how wrong and horrible they are for going to watch a dolphin show or swim with dolphins.
* Likely since A) they are so recent, having only been established since the 1940s, and B) because their natural habitat is the seeming "endless open space" of the ocean)
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Convinced by Ric O’Barry that all of these animals are tortured and suicidal, and all of them came from a little cove in Japan where their families were butchered. Frighteningly, I have even seen people try to claim that Atlantic bottlenose dolphins or beluga whales "must have been taken from Taiji"...
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I can make you all happy by telling you that it isn’t true. At all.
But here is a fun little phenomeon within human psychology, where one decides that what one heard first, the horrible stuff, must be true. And if one gets proved with 100% assurance that something much better is true, one still says “No, I don’t believe you”.
Quartl
In this case I can prove that dolphins have good lives in human care*, and that almost none come from the hunts in Japan.
* "Captivity" is a highly charged, negative and damaging word associated with words like "slavery", "imprisonment" and "bondage", and should never be used about any animal
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The drive hunts and the subsequent slaughter is real, no doubts about that. It has been going on at least since the 17th century, and was originally only for meat. Many countries with access to whales or dolphins have hunted and slaughtered them throughout the ages, for food. It is now getting banned more and more, for reasons or ethics and sustainability.
No sane person would get the idea to drive a whole herd of deer for example, into a cul-de-sac and the slowly kill them with pikes and knives, and this is similar to how the drive hunts used to be handled.
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Not because dolphins are worth more than other animals and "must never be used for food" - that can be your opinion and I would myself never eat a dolphin, but it's not right to force our personal beliefs onto other people - but because it was performed in such a horribly unethical way.
Besides for the dolphin hunts, many other ways of handling marine life are done with such poor care or thought to ethics or sustainability, that we would never consider doing to land animals - like long-lines, or trawling nets, that both take bycatch and kill countless other species than the ones we want.
While the world was shocked by seeing the Cove, I and many others did not find out about the dolphin slaughter through it. Ric O’Barry was far from the first to reveal what was going on. He just twisted it with lies about dolphinariums and the reasons for the hunts, and got a huge film published where he paints himself as an unquestionable hero.
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For my part, I found out about it in Earthlings, an animal-rights film four years older than the Cove. Now, Earthlings isn’t necessarily unbiased or 100% true either, but their segment (time-stamped, and it lasts for three minutes) about the dolphin slaughter contains no falsehoods. They tell it as it is, the dolphin slaughter is for meat, and they show you how it happens (or happened).
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And not even Earthlings was first. They got their video clips from elsewhere, which is brought up in “Investigation of the Cove”, a YouTube video in two parts. I only link to part 1 here, below, as part 2 is age-restricted, but can easily be found on YouTube.
This is a very important video to watch if you were convinced by the Cove.
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In my own words, I will bring up some of the main claims here, to debunk the important parts of the Cove.
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1. Ric O’Barry and the other people behind the Cove claims that dolphin parks “helped create the biggest dolphin slaughter on the planet”. That the parks (paraphrasing) “motivated the fishermen in Japan to catch dolphins in order to sell them”.
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It gives a clear image that the dolphin drive hunt did not exist before dolphin parks, that the parks was what prompted the slaughter, and that it was a pure afterthought to then slaughter the unsold dolphins for their meat.
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Wrong.
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The dolphin slaughter in Japan has existed since at least 1606, while dolphins weren’t kept in dolphinariums until 1938 (Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in Florida), and dolphin parks in Japan started appearing, and getting their dolphins from the slaughter, as late as the mid-1980s (with an exception that I have found, where a Japanese facility did have pilot whales from Taiji as early as 1934).
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So the hunt started more than 350 years before dolphinariums.
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But have the parks become the “motivation” behind the hunt, today?
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For that, we have to look at the numbers.
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In 2007, the same year as the Cove was being filmed in Japan, a total of 13 170 dolphins and porpoises were killed in all of Japan. 90, meaning 0.7%, were sold alive, the rest were slaughtered for meat. So if it’s only 0.7%, seven out of a thousand, what meaning do dolphin parks have for the hunt?
For a more recent example, in the 2017-2018 season [link], a total of 928 animals were rounded up, 615 were killed (66%), 107 were live-caught (11.5%), and 206 were released (22%).
Just looking at these numbers, one can see directly that if all the dolphin parks in the world were closed tomorrow, it would do absolutely nothing to end the slaughter.
And there’s another thing: the claim “all in the world”.
This is a screenshot I took from the film. In another version(?), seen in the above linked video, this segment also has the following text added: "Taiji is the largest supplier of dolphins to marine parks and swim with dolphin programs around the world."
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2. O’Barry says, loud and clear, that the dolphins are then sent to parks and dolphinariums around the world, and shows this map, which includes all of North America and Europe.
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Wrong.
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Below we have an accurate map of where dolphins from the hunt in Japan have ended up:
Ceta-base, the source, is not sponsored by dolphin parks, they have no profit in this, it is a neutral database for all cetaceans in human care around the world, and is considered a reliable source on all sides. [Link]
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The only country in Europe which currently has dolphins from Japan is Ukraine, and depending on whether you consider them part of Europe, Russia and Georgia. Just a single park in North America, Cabo Adventures in Mexico, has dolphins from Japan (imported in 2005).
In the US it has long been illegal to import cetaceans caught in hunts like these, since 1993. As of the 2010s, there was only a single Japanese dolphin left in the United States, a false killer whale in Hawaii named Kina (below), who was caught on Iki Island in 1987.
She passed away at Sea Life Park in 2019, aged around 44 years old.
Lorislferrari
When the parks in America and Europe were still taking dolphins from the drive hunt, they saw themselves as “rescuers” of the animals that would otherwise be slaughtered. You can think of it as the one who sees an abused, miserable animal in a pet store, and buys it just to “save” it. The person knows that the pet store doesn’t care one bit and will just buy in more animals that will end up in the same situation, but they feel so sorry for the animal, does the irrational and gives money to its abuser.
This is not a perfect comparison though, because the pet store would stop if no one bought animals from it. As we’ve already established, the dolphin hunt and slaughter would continue even if not a single park bought from them.
However, the western parks (and some others) later changed their minds, and decided that they just could not associate with such a practice, even if it was just to save animals from being killed.
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Even if we imagine, for the sake of argument, that dolphinariums in the west did not care about the animals (as anti-zoo activists think), why would they be importing animals from Taiji today?
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We have successful breeding programs. Dolphins of several species live, reproduce and thrive in human care. Wild animals are generally more difficult to care for than domesticated pets and livestock, and so, if they eat, interact, play and reproduce, it generally means that they are doing well (unlike some domestic animals, which will reproduce easily even in horrendous living conditions).
The average lifespan of wild dolphins is about 20-25 years. Dolphins in human care can easily make it to their 40s, and several have lived past 60 years, like Nellie, below.
All countries taking dolphins from Japan in the days of the Cove-onwards, are in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Ukraine, and one lone park in Mexico that did it in 2005.
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Ric O’Barry’s constant, repeated motto is “don’t buy a ticket”. So his point with that is that if no one bought a ticket to a dolphinarium, then the fishermen of Japan would stop slaughtering dolphins for meat? As we’ve already gone through, this is completely false.
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It would be like saying, that you can end Asian dog slaughter, if you would just not go to a dog show in North America or Europe.
“You have to boycott the kennel clubs! Make them stop this! If you buy a puppy, you’re paying for the death of dogs in Korea and China!”
This, of course sounds ridiculous, but the two have as much to do with each other, as western dolphin parks have to do with Japanese slaughter of dolphins for meat.
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3. Investigation brings up that Ric O’Barry wasn’t the first at all, but it was rather Hardy Jones and Jacques Costeau, who made a film about the drive hunts already in 1982, and then Hardy Jones made another film in 2005.
He is not pro-dolphinarium, but is honest about the drive hunts being for meat and “pest control”, and the few taken into aquariums end up in parks in Asia, not in America or Europe. He is the one who truly exposed the dolphin drive hunts, and is barely mentioned in the Cove. If you have seen the film, do you remember Hardy Jones’ name in it? He’s there, but so little that he’s quickly forgotten, while Ric O’Barry keeps shining the spotlight on himself as the hero.
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4. Ric O’Barry introduces himself in the beginning of the film as the one who trained the dolphins for the Flipper-movies, and that he became anti-dolphinarium in 1970 when one of the Flipper-dolphins, Kathy, according to his own words "committed suicide" right in front of him.
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But the fact is that Ricou Browning was the creator and producer of Flipper. It was Browning, Not O’Barry, who trained the first Flipper-dolphins. And according to Miami Seaquarium, Kathy’s death came at the end of a long time of sickness, it was not "suicide". There is actually no evidence at all that dolphins or any other animal other than humans can understand death, plan events and commit suicide. All we have are the words of a clearly extremely biased, convicted dolphin abuser (more below) and exposed liar.
From the YouTube description of Investigation of the Cove (I’m removing a few parts already mentioned):
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“As recently as 1989, despite his supposed epiphany, O’Barry continued to seek employment in a marine life facility. From a 1993 article in
“Animal People” Captain Paul Watson wrote: “It was only after [Steve] Wynn turned down O’Barry’s application for a trainer’s job [1989] that O’Barry became critical of the Mirage”.
David Saddler
Does O’Barry’s contradictory past mean “The Cove’s” message is not valid? Certainly not. Few could willingly ignore the violent slaughter of one of the world’s most popular animals; and this is exactly what the creators of “The Cove” are relying on.
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O’Barry and producer Louie Psihoyos hijack the film’s message to promote a not-so-hidden agenda of anti-zoo that deviates from the real reason behind the slaughter in Taiji. “The Cove” deliberately portrays a sinister link between the killings in Taiji and U.S. marine life parks that does not exist.
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At 18:49 minutes into the film, O’Barry states “[about marine life parks] … a multibillion dollar industry, and all of these captures helped create the largest slaughter of dolphins on the planet”. At that precise moment, we see the entrance to Dolphin Cove, a marine life park located in Key Largo, Florida. Ironically, Dolphin Cove Key Largo does not have any dolphins from the Taiji slaughter, nor has it ever.
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According to the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, an association that represents most major marine life parks in the western hemisphere, none of their 44 members “have or take animals from the [Taiji] drive.” It has been more than three decades since any western facility brought dolphins from Taiji.
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Berkley-based Earth Island Institute (EII) is behind the making of “The Cove.” For the past two decades, O’Barry has acted as the henchman for EII in their campaign to gain de facto control over the marine zoological community; the same “certification” control that EII has exacted upon the tuna industry with their private “Dolphin Safe” label. “The Cove” is O’Barry and EII’s latest deception in this well defined scheme, only this time they envision a “Dolphin Safe Marine Park” label as their “Oscar.”
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The recent SeaWorld tragedy plays right into their hands and they are downright jubilant about it. In a red carpet interview, Psihoyos cheerfully admitted that the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld and the Oscar nomination combined to their benefit and described the circumstances as “the perfect storm for us.”
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O’Barry and Psihoyos may have their moment of fame and EII may even levy a toll on marine life parks in the process, but neither outcome will stop the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji. Much like the evolution of awareness about marine life in the United States, only education and changing values toward dolphins will stop a 335 year old cultural hunt. But then again, ending the dolphin slaughter in Taiji was never the primary intent of the Oscar winning documentary “The Cove.”
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Something they did not bring up in Investigation of the Cove - what happened with the dolphins O’Barry “freed”.
“In January 1998, an extremist named Ric O’Barry, and others involved in a “return-to-the-wild” project were federally charged with violating the MMPA. They were charged with harassing and illegally transporting two dolphins, Buck and Luther. Ric O’Barry dumped these two dolphins into a wild pod six miles off the coast of Key West on May 23, 1996 after they’d spent a year in a “re-conditioning” program at Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary. Neither Buck nor Luther was from Florida waters. NOAA Fisheries arranged for both dolphins to be rescued out of concern for their inability to survive in the wild alone.
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Luther was sighted the day after his release approaching boats and jet skis. He was rescued when he followed a group of jet skiers into a remote area. Buck disappeared for two weeks after being abandoned by Ric O’Barry. Buck, close to death, was rescued by the federal government and DRC personnel. He had traveled over 100 miles without Luther or other dolphins. He had lost a third of his body-weight, was severely dehydrated and was breaking down his fat and muscle tissues for energy. Some of the most prominent marine mammal veterinarians examined Buck and diagnosed his condition as typical of terminally ill, stranded cetaceans. He did not have the knowledge or the tools he needed to survive.
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Buck was in critical condition when he arrived at DRC. Due to our dedication and Buck’s spirit, he gained weight back and felt better. We enjoyed working with Buck and his boyish enthusiasm for three years, but he never fully recovered from his near-death experience, and having been so emaciated, dehydrated and stressed. He experienced high points and low points in his recovery until he let go peacefully on June 20th of 1999. Buck leaves a legacy of truth to another possible ending to the Free Willy story, and we will continue to honor his life in sharing his truth.
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In June 1999, Judge Peter A. Fitzpatrick, a U.S. Administrative Law Judge, fined all that were involved in this case – Ric O’Barry, Lloyd Good III, Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary and the Dolphin Project Inc. – civil penalties of $40,000 for illegally “taking” by harassment and illegally transporting Buck and Luther. The Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary was also fined $19,500 for failing to notify NOAA Fisheries prior to transporting Buck and Luther. The Honorable Fitzpatrick chose to fine the maximum penalties provided by law, because he wanted to set a precedent to prevent irresponsible releases in the future.
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In issues of ethics involving marine mammal law, the most important aspect to remember is to use our emotions to drive us into action, but to also use our critical minds to guide us. Do not take anything stated or written at face value. Look behind the voices and the words. Always check references of statistics given and statements quoted making sure that they are being interpreted correctly and that they are current. The best ambassador for marine mammals and their environment is a motivated and informed one!” [Source]
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Of course they didn’t tell us that. “Oh, by the way, the dolphins I in my heroic selflessness set free couldn’t make it on their own, and one of them died because of my idiocy”, wouldn’t help paint him as a hero, which is the point of the film. As an addition to that, many within the anti-dolphinaria movement thinks that animals are better off dead than cared for by people. So O’Barry, I’m thinking it would not be too bold to guess, still thinks he did the right thing.
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When I was making my video project "Free the Whales!" in 2017, I contacted the Dolphin Research Center directly to get them to confirm this for me. I explained beforehand that I needed this information in order to be able to show this publicly, and the following is the reponse I got:
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"We believe, and we tell our guests and anyone who asks, that Buck suffered lasting complications from the long term starvation and dehydration he endured when he was illegally released. He died about three years after the illegal release, but remember what he went through.
When he was spotted about 13 days after the release, he was only seven miles from our facility and our personnel went out to get him. He was weak and emaciated, but he followed the boat back here. Buck was examined by five veterinarians; all agreed that he would not have lived another 72 hours if he had not been rescued. He had lost 100 pounds and had a propeller wound on his back."
So if you set a dolphin or any other animal free in the wild (like Keiko above), and it dies shortly after in great pains, so what? Now it’s “free” and doesn’t need to be “enslaved” by humans any longer. Those are people who care more about their agenda and ideology, and to think of themselves as the good guys and heroes, than about the animal’s actual welfare and suffering.
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There were more things that Investigation of the Cove did not bring up, like O’Barry’s claim that all dolphins in human care are constantly medicated for stress. I have looked and looked, and not been able to find a shred of evidence for this claim. The only thing I have found, is of some practices from the 1960s, where cetacean keeping was very much in its infancy and they did what they could with what little they had and knew. If it has happened since then, it has to be very rare and for good reasons.
"They're so mad from captivity they must be drugged" simply is not true.
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He claims that they are all half-stressed to death because they live in “concrete pools with loud music and screaming audiences”, and that it’s ruining their sonar. I can directly say that the way he puts it isn’t true either. Sounds from above mainly bounce off the water surface. Put your own head down in the water and see how much you hear. It’s different with sounds that are actually in the water; some wild whales and dolphins are being severly disturbed by boat traffic, since the boat engines and propellers are actually under water, so the noise disturbs the animals ability to communicate, hunt and localize.
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If the sound from music and audiences disturbed the animals, we would have seen this in any of the millions of times dolphin and whale shows have been performed around the world.
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Nor is there any evidence that concrete walls in pools (and why is this constant complaining with the concrete pools? Would it be better if they were made of glass, stone, clay?) would create problems with their sonar. If it did, they wouldn’t be able to swim normally, communicate or locate objects. But they do all of these, without problems.
Finally
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Dolphins aren’t worth more or less than any other animals. But exactly like with other animals, we should, with an open but critical mind, look at how they’re actually living and doing in zoological care before we make up our minds in any direction. And even then, we should keep being open to change our opinion when new information comes to light.
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I am not going to go into detail about all the myths (and truths) about cetaceans in human care here, just give you a little food for thought. We often see dolphins and whales as “extra special” because they are so alien to us, and of course, so extremely intelligent. They live in a three-dimensional world, while we land animals mostly only live in two “dimensions”.
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But dolphins aren’t the only hyper-intelligent animals we have in human care. Elephants, great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans), corvids, and psittacines (parrots and cockatoos) are on roughly the same level as dolphins. It’s hard to measure intelligence since different animals have different skills, but all of these animals have self-awareness, meaning a sense of “me”, and they all have strong bonds between individuals. All have the ability to roam over vast distances in the wild.
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When it comes to the vast spaces they have in the wild, many anti-zoo activists love to compare the size of the pools with the size of the combined world oceans. As if any dolphin or whale would be swimming around the world oceans in its lifetime. Most animals, even in the vast oceans, live in the same region all their lives, and it varies depending on species and subspecies.
Killer whales for example can be shown on a map to live in all oceans of the world, and then some of us draw the conclusion that one individual whale will itself swim from Norway to Canada to New Zealand, over and over again during its lifetime. While the obvious fact is that killer whales are separate ecotypes around the world, just like other widespread species such as humans or wolves, and the individual animals live in the same place all their lives. Just because a wolf or deer lives on the landmass of Eurasia, doesn’t mean it’s going to wander from Spain to China during its lifetime, or even a fraction of it.
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And to give it a bit of perspective with other animals, Syrian hamsters (which still aren’t classified as domestic animals, they have only been bred since the 1930s) run up to 5 miles in a day. To get up to that, a hamster would have to run over 4400 turns around a decent-sized cage. In one night.
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Horses can run up to 40 miles in a day. If the horse has a pasture of an acre, meaning about 63.6 meters in any direction, it has to run 253 turns around the pasture (unless it rounds off the corner, and then it’s more turns) to get up to 40 miles.
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Budgies (also wild animals) can fly up to 250 miles and macaws 500 miles in one day! There we don’t even have to try to calculate how many turns they would have to take, since they often can’t fly even one turn in a “large cage”.
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The oceans are vast, but what is more vast than the sky?
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All animals deserve to move in a natural way. Horses and hamsters need to run, budgies and macaws to fly, and dolphins need to swim. But they don’t need to run/fly/swim great distances in a straight line at their maximum capacity even a single time in their life to have a great quality of life.
That is the big distinction people often make, completely irrational, between cetaceans and other animals. That for some reason dolphins are “special” and deserve “freedom” in a way that no other animal does. But there is no logic, no rime or reason to this idea. It is an ideology created by lies (through films like the Cove and Blackfish), fed by propaganda, subsequent emotions and inconsistent thinking or cognitive dissonance. When one is pumped with emotions, one cannot think rationally.
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One has to shut off, or tone down one’s emotions, and try to think openly and logically, and the motivation always has to be to find the truth, what really is welfare and what really is suffering. Not to start with "the truth", decide what to believe in and then just look for things supporting it. Because regardless of what you believe, you can bet anything that there is someone on the internet agreeing with you and who can argue for it - but that doesn’t make it right or true.
It has to be about what’s best for the animals. Not to be able to pat yourself on the back and sleep well at night, because you wrote some angry posts on the internet. In the end, because of this aggressive ignorance displayed by thousands upon thousands of people writing their angry posts, they can destroy something truly valuable.
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Anti-zoo and anti-aquarium sentiments are not founded in reality. They are not supported by the majority (the majority is who are visiting these places), and they are not supported by science and evidence. They are completely supported by a tiny minorityof angry loudmouths, who will do anything from cyber bullying to picketing to actually killing animals to get their way and prove their point (several facilities have had mysterious animal deaths in recent years, deaths caused by foreign toxins, just as protests about those facilities were ramping up).
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Please think, before you join these people. Their goal is not what's best for the animals. Their goal is to feel better about themselves.