"Flipper, lives in a world full of wonder, flying there under, under the sea."
-- Theme from the '60s TV series Flipper.
Actually, Flipper's world was a small salt-water lake, next to the house that doubled as the onscreen home of TV's Dr. Keith Ricks and the real-life home of dolphin wrangler Richard O'Barry.
"You seldom saw the horizon on the show," says O'Barry, the dolphin activist whose knowledge of the cetacean horrors carried out in a Japanese town called Taiji is the catalyst for a high-tech, save-the-dolphin project in the documentary The Cove.
"It was recently established that, like humans and great apes, dolphins are self-aware." O'Barry says. "But I was aware then. I used to bring the television down to the dock on Friday nights so Flipper could watch Flipper (Flipper was any of five bottle-nosed dolphins, his favourite of which was named Kathy).
"I was in my 20s, making a lot of money, buying a new Porsche every year, and it's very easy to lull yourself into complacency. I didn't do anything about it, even though I pretty much knew by the end of the series that they didn't belong in captivity."
Flipper's antics inspired a boom in Sea Worlds and Marinelands worldwide. "I could have stayed in that industry and been making three or four hundred thousand a year at Sea World, or started my own dolphin program and made three or four million."
Instead, O'Barry tried to make amends, as a specialist with the San Francisco-based International Marine Mammal Project, protesting Sea Worlds (including Niagara Falls' Marineland) and finally discovering Taiji, the worst place in the world to be a dolphin.
There, for months starting in September, fishermen bang pots to scare the sound-sensitive dolphins into the harbour to be sorted as sea-quarium attractions (at a price of up to $150,000 each). Then the real horror begins, and the left-behinds are slaughtered in a secluded cove by the hundreds daily, to be sold as mercury-laden "whale meat" and school lunches.
Living for four years in a nearby town, O'Barry became an expert on the slaughter, bringing in CNN, BBC and finally Louis Psihoyos, a veteran National Geographic photographer and head of the Oceanic Preservation Society. Psihoyos, who'd never directed before, took a three-day film course in advance of his first visit to Taiji.
"When I drove into Taiji with Rick the first time, it was like I'd driven into a ready-made horror movie set," Psihoyos' crew is verbally and physically threatened and kept away from "the secret." Which is where Psihoyos' rich best friend came in, Internet billionaire Jim Clark (of Netscape fame) financed what can only be described as a paramilitary operation, complete with HD-camera-equipped rocks, underwater cameras and soundgear, all of it installed on the beach in the dead of night.
"It doesn't feel like a documentary, does it?" Psihoyos sayu. "The director John Ford said making a movie is a lot like painting a picture with an army. With us, it was more like a Navy SEAL team."
The footage they caught embarrassed the Japanese government and led to cancellation of the "lunch program." Psihoyos and O'Barry both hope it also puts a crimp in the Japanese campaign to have the whale-hunt ban rescinded.
The key to closing the cove, O'Barry says, is the mercury.
"It's the Achilles Heel. If you get into talking about cultural differences, you lose. But getting that film before the Japanese people is the most important thing. There's no way the Japanese consumer is going to purchase dolphin meat once they see this movie. They care more about what they eat than we do."
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