Blood in the water

Ric O’Barry and Louie Psihoyos talk about
going undercover to film a clandestine
dolphin bloodbath in the new doc The Cove

KILLING SEAS: The Cove

By MARK SLUTSKY

“I was three-feet high, living in Miami Beach, looking out to sea, and my mother would tell me stories of dolphins saving the lives of humans,” says Richard “Ric” O’Barry. “This was during the Second World War—planes would get shot out of the sky and dolphins would save the flyer by pushing them ashore. We have stories from Aristotle and Plato and Pliny the Younger and all these scholars from the Greek era reporting stories like that. That stuck with me. That’s special. Somebody saves the life of another person, that’s altruism, which we reserve for humans, but dolphins have been doing that a very long time.”

O’Barry’s life would go on to be entangled with the fate of dolphins in a way that the young Floridian could never have guessed. He would gain fame as the man who captured and trained the dolphins who appeared in the wildly successful 1960s TV show Flipper, which was largely responsible for bringing the marine mammals into the mass consciousness and spurring the popularity of dolphin captivity programs around the world.

Then, on Earth Day, 1970, when Kathy, one of the Flipper dolphins, died in O’Barry’s arms—a death he’s convinced was suicide, that the depressed dolphin deliberately stopped breathing to end her misery in captivity—he did an immediate about-face, turning into a dolphin and porpoise activist overnight. Forty years after Flipper made him a minor celebrity, O’Barry would find himself in the small town of Taiji, Japan, trying to stop an annual, and almost unknown dolphin slaughter, an effort chronicled in Louie Psihoyos’s remarkably affecting new documentary The Cove.

In the film, O’Barry and Psihoyos, a former National Geographic photographer, head to Taiji to try and capture the massacre on film, but are averted at every turn. It soon becomes apparent that what they’re confronting is much more complex than some local fishermen killing the sea mammals for meat. As it turns out, every year, trainers and fishermen work to capture live dolphins to be sold into captivity at marine parks around the world—a single animal can go for as much as $200,000. The dolphins that aren’t sold are killed en masse and their meat, high in dangerous mercury, is sold as more expensive whale meat in supermarkets and placed in school lunches across Japan.

The killing is done at a small, highly-guarded cove (thus the title of the film) with almost no access to anyone but those involved in the slaughter. In a twist you’ve probably never seen in a documentary before, Psihoyos and his crew decided to get evidence of the killing guerilla-style. Working with Industrial Light & Magic (the Star Wars special effects house), they designed inconspicuous, rock-shaped hidden cameras, snuck into the cove under the dead of night and set them up there, and snuck out the footage later. The result is incontrovertible, and horrifying, evidence of a heretofore secret crime, ignored by bodies like the International Whaling Commission that might have the power to stop it.

HIDDEN CAMERA CREW: Psihoyos (l) and the Cove team

FEARSOME FOOTAGE

Sitting down with Psihoyos at Café Santropol to talk about the film, I ask the filmmaker if he was surprised by what he saw on the footage. “Shocked. Shocked would be a better word,” he says. “We actually have our reactions on camera but we didn’t use it because we wanted the audience to come up with their own impressions, their own ideas, to not feel bad if they didn’t feel the same way that we felt. We were pretty horrified. But you know, that said, what you saw is the Disney version of the horror that goes on back there.”

The seas literally run red with blood in the explosive few moments of footage shown in The Cove. What does he mean by “the Disney version”? “There’s all sorts of stuff in the film that we shot—that the rocks shot, really—we couldn’t put in there,” he explains. “It was just too horrific. Mothers being pulled from their babies, killing both mothers and calves, which they’re not supposed to do, talking about ‘Did the guy from the union see that?’ ‘No, it’s not going to be a problem,’ that kind of stuff. Blood squirting and spraying out.”

There’s a scary irony in the friendly-looking, seemingly dolphin-loving town of Taiji and the dark doings that occur there, unbeknownst to most of the Japanese populace. “Driving into Taiji was like driving into a horror film,” says Psihoyos. “You go over the bridge and there’s two dolphins on either side and then there’s the mural with the anime dolphins and in English, ‘We Love Dolphins.’ Everything about the town says ‘We love dolphins.’ Every dolphin, porpoise and whale known to man is depicted in these beautiful tiles along the streets. Along the nature walkways, they have these brass plaques with all the histories of these whales that were seen around the coast. And then, right in the middle of town, in a nature preserve, a national park, is the cove! Nestled between the whaling museum and the city hall is this cove that nobody’s allowed to go in, even Japanese people. Steel gates, spikes, barbed wire, guard dogs on one side, sensors, two tunnels to get through to get there, guards.”

PORPOISE-DRIVEN LIFE: O’Barry

HOSTILE RECEPTION

The townspeople’s hostility to activists and filmmakers is evident. I ask O’Barry what it’s like to visit Taiji as a known dolphin advocate. “In a word, stressful. Extremely stressful,” he says. “You don’t sleep at all. What goes on is so over the top. Once you witness that, you can’t un-see that and you’re supposed to go back to your hotel and sleep at night! After watching this Dante’s Inferno for dolphins!

“It’s stressful, it’s dangerous. You have the Japanese yakuza, who are very involved in whaling and the fisheries industry watching all the time. You don’t know what they’re going to do or what they’re doing, you have the police from four different cities watching you all the time. You have the fishermen and you always have to watch out for the drunken angry fishermen who might do something stupid.”

More than the story of the dolphins, the film emerges as a portrait of O’Barry himself, a single-minded, even tragic figure who seems to still be making up for his past. “Somebody the other day was like, what’s it like to work with a zealot?” says Psihoyos. “And I was like, well, I guess Rosa Parks was a zealot. Martin Luther King was probably a zealot. The founders of America were probably zealots. I guess when you look back at all meaningful change throughout culture, it was done by people who were really passionate. Like Margaret Mead said, meaningful change usually happens because of passionate individuals, not because of committees or governments.

“But to me, he’s a hero. I’ve been to the cove, I did seven trips to Taiji, making this film, but I was always connected to my crew, we had walkie-talkies, we had Plan Bs and Plan As. But I’ve called Ric up when he’s been at the cove by himself. It’s 5:30 in the morning and he’s waiting there by himself. He’s really putting himself in danger! He’s the only guy I know who puts himself in the way of danger to save dolphins. That’s passion. It’s not grandstanding. He’s not doing this for the camera, he’s doing it because he’s Ric O’Barry. He says he’s not operating out of guilt, but I feel he’s operating on remote control because he still feels like he has to redeem himself. He did create all this mess.”

THE COVE OPENS THIS FRIDAY, AUG. 14.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON
RICHARD O’BARRY’S WORK, VISIT
SAVEJAPANDOLPHINS.ORG