THERE I WAS, on the stage of the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, before a packed crowd of stars and a television audience of hundreds of millions of people in more than 200 countries (41.3 million people in the United States alone), participating in the acceptance of an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 2010 for The Cove.
In my rented tuxedo, I had been sitting in the audience with director Louie Psihoyos and producers Fisher Stevens and Paula DuPré Presmen, when actor Matt Damon announced the winner. “The Cove,” he said. The theater exploded, and as I got up in a daze and walked down the aisle to the stage, blockbuster director James Cameron reached out and shook my hand!
Onstage, I stood to the rear as Fisher Stevens thanked the Academy. As we had planned, when he introduced me, I unrolled my little sign that said: TEXT DOLPHIN TO 44144. The message was intended to bring cell phone users to our online petition against the killing of dolphins. But the cameras veered away from me, and the microphone was silenced just as Louie stepped up to give his thanks and urge the people of Japan to see The Cove. We were quickly ushered off stage. I felt sorry for Louie, until it became clear the next day that because of the clumsy effort to cut us off, Louie’s acceptance speech and photos of me and my sign became Internet sensations, seen and talked about by far more people than likely would have noticed had we not been cut off. The sign paid off in a big way—we received more than a million signatures as a result.
How on earth did I get here?
Well, that’s the story in this book. It has been, as the song goes, “a long strange trip.” All because of a fictional dolphin named Flipper and a passion that grew into a dream—that all dolphins everywhere should be free and safe in the oceans of the world.
The Cove, a remarkable work of film art that has garnered more awards than any other documentary in history, grew out of a short DVD that artists Diana Thater and Kelly Mason, Diana’s husband, and I produced about the dolphin killing taking place in the small Japanese coastal town of Taiji. The DVD had developed out of a partnership with Earth Island Institute in Berkeley, California, and its executive director, David Phillips, to conduct an ongoing international campaign to stop the killing of dolphins in Japan and elsewhere around the world. The campaign, in turn, had its origins in a meeting in San Francisco in 2003, and a coincidental phone call from Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd, needing help in Taiji.
David Phillips had been the mastermind behind the successful effort to save the orca Keiko, known to moviegoers as the orca featured in the hit movie Free Willy. Keiko was filmed for the movie in a small tank in Mexico City and was in very ill health at the time. Phillips, with the support of Free Willy producer Richard Donner, Warner Bros., and other organizations, was able to raise millions of dollars to move Keiko to a special tank at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and then to a sea pen and eventual freedom off the coast of Iceland, where Keiko had originally been caught when just two years old. Keiko lived in his home Atlantic waters for the last four years of his life, even swimming to Norway, before sadly dying of pneumonia. But at least he had the experience of returning to his native waters and swimming freely with wild orcas.
With his small Earth Island staff of Todd Steiner, Sam LaBudde, Brenda Killian, Mark Berman, and Mark J. Palmer, Phillips also spearheaded the amazingly successful worldwide Dolphin Safe tuna effort, which reduced dolphin kills in the tuna fishery from eighty thousand to one hundred thousand a year in the late 1980s to less than one thousand recorded in recent years.
The meeting Phillips organized in San Francisco in 2003 invited dolphin activists from around the world to discuss the status of efforts to stop the imprisonment of dolphins in captivity (more about that later in this book) and to develop strategies for future efforts. It was during that three-day summit meeting that I got a phone call. A volunteer working for Paul Watson and staying in Taiji during the dolphin-hunt season needed additional help for protection from angry dolphin killers. I brought up the issue at the summit meeting. When nobody volunteered to go over to Japan, I did, although I was not and never have been a member of Sea Shepherd. The hat was passed, and I received pledges of funding from a variety of organizations represented there to pay for my plane ticket. I was off on a road that was to lead to hostile demonstrations, the dark truth about mercury poisoning, the Academy Awards, and the formation of a campaign to confront the largest slaughter of dolphins remaining in the world today.
To enter the town of Taiji is to enter a very weird world indeed. The town is dotted with amazing statues and other art depicting dolphins and whales, and boasts the Taiji Whale Museum (which is actually a whaling museum). You would think that it is a town that loves whales and dolphins. But it is here that eight hundred to more than a thousand dolphins are killed each year.
The fishermen say they kill the dolphins “quickly and humanely.” That’s an outright lie. The methods used to kill the dolphins are so savage it’s hard to believe it unless you witness it for yourself. And once you’ve seen it, the images and sounds of the screaming dolphins never go away. The fishermen, guided by their government—notably, the corrupt Japan Fisheries Agency, which promotes commercial whaling, thinly disguised as “scientific research”—hide behind phrases such as “food culture” and “tradition,” knowing that the world would be outraged if the truth got out.
In essence, what happens is, after a prolonged chase in the ocean, entire schools of dolphins are driven into a hidden cove (now made famous by the documentary). Once the dolphins are trapped in the cove, the fishermen slash the animals’ throats with knives or stab them with spears. The water turns red with dolphin blood, and the air fills with their screams.
This brutal massacre goes on for six months of every year, generally between September and April. Even more scandalous than this massacre, members of the international aquarium industry take advantage of the slaughter to obtain a few show-quality dolphins for use in captive dolphin shows and swim-with programs. By paying huge prices for live dolphins, the aquarium industry basically subsidizes the slaughter.
Taiji, with its proximity to shore, is just a microcosm of what takes place elsewhere in Japan. Twenty-three thousand permits to kill dolphins and small whales are issued annually. Most of the killings involve Dall’s porpoises that are harpooned offshore from small boats, well out of sight from land.
It is commonly assumed that Japanese fishermen hunt dolphins to supply a small minority of Japanese people with dolphin meat. But unlike expensive whale meat, dolphin meat is not considered a delicacy in Japan, and the real reason the Japanese government issues permits to kill dolphins by the thousands every year has nothing to do with food culture. It has to do with pest control. As shocking as it sounds, some Japanese government officials view dolphins as pests to be eradicated in huge numbers. During a meeting that my wife, Helene, and I had early on at the Taiji town hall, the fishermen of Taiji admitted this to us. We had offered to pay them to stop killing dolphins, but they all said, “It’s not about money, it’s about pest control.” In other words, killing the competition is their way of preserving the ocean’s fish for themselves.
To say I was shocked when I arrived and witnessed this bloodbath firsthand is an understatement. I’ve seen all kinds of things done to dolphins in my travels around the world, but I have never seen anything as horrible as this annual dolphin drive hunt in Taiji. Words fail me.
I immediately sought to bring the truth of this slaughter to the outside world.
Efforts by some environmentalists to address the dolphin slaughter in Japan had been going on for many years. For example, some film footage of the slaughter, mostly taken in the Bay of Futo, another small coastal town up the coast from Taiji, had reached foreign media and been aired. I talked with David Phillips about it. We agreed a long-term, high-profile, coordinated campaign—a Save Japan Dolphins Campaign—was needed to put the spotlight of public opinion, both inside and outside Japan, on the dolphin slaughter. We agreed we had to shut it down, but how?
The only way to try to stop the dolphin slaughter was to keep showing up in the remote village of Taiji and go on patrol. We knew we had to monitor, advocate, film, and bring international media attention to the dolphin slaughter and related captures. One of the main reasons that the killing continues is that very few people, both in Japan and around the world, even know it is happening. If you ask the average Japanese person on the street (as was done in The Cove), most will tell you they do not know that dolphins are being killed in Japan and are surprised and even outraged by it. Worldwide exposure of the slaughter is the key to stopping it.
Early on in the campaign I became a filmmaker, focusing my lens on the slaughter during the long hunt season. It was tricky because the fishermen, having been filmed before, hid the killing from prying eyes. They did the actual slaughter in a remote cove far from where people and their cameras could reach. They used plastic tarps to cover up the areas where the dolphins are butchered. I had to sneak into cliff areas at night and stay there all day, hidden from the fishermen, in order to get what video footage I could. This effort, resulting in our DVD Welcome to Taiji, did a good job of explaining the dolphin hunt, but the footage was disappointing due to the obstacles we encountered.
Our Save Japan Dolphins Campaign also included testing dolphin meat for contamination. It had long been known that some of the dolphin meat sold in Japanese markets had high levels of mercury, but we were astonished when we had our samples tested and found levels of mercury fifty times higher than recommended by Japanese health authorities. These tests were later challenged by local fishermen and the mayor of Taiji, but the tests had been done by Japanese scientists and can be repeated by any interested parties. These test results totally overwhelm claims by the Japan Fisheries Agency that killing and eating dolphin meat should be allowed because it is part of Japan’s “food culture.” Dolphin meat is poisonous to the people of Japan, especially to its children and pregnant women. This is an issue not just about dolphins, but about the human right to a healthy diet as well.
I did all I could to invite others to join me in Taiji, using our DVD to encourage international media coverage of the dolphin slaughter. I spent several days going around Tokyo with Japanese colleagues, visiting all the major media outlets there. I met with television and print reporters. Several were very interested and agreed that it was a great story. But, they said, they could not write about it or talk about it. Their editors would not accept such stories if they wrote them. There is a blackout in media coverage of issues concerning whales and dolphins in Japan, with the exception of the government’s viewpoint. It is simply amazing how little good information (and how much bad information) the public in Japan gets about the worldwide controversy over whaling and dolphin killing, all because the media bows to the wishes of the Japan Fisheries Agency. Eighty percent of Japan’s protein comes from the sea, and, as a result, the Fisheries Agency is politically very powerful in Japan.
Even though Japanese media were reluctant, I was slowly succeeding with outside media, bringing in cameras from the BBC, CNN, and ABC. Freelance journalist Boyd Harnell and Japan Times editor Andrew Kershaw were stellar in their award-winning series of stories about the issue. We were slowly getting the word out to the wider world about what was happening in Taiji.
With Earth Island and our collaborators at other organizations, including some in Japan, we built a network of activists to bring public attention to the hunts. On the first of every September, we orchestrated demonstrations in front of Japanese embassies and consulates in more than fifty cities around the world, urging the public to help us stop the slaughter of dolphins in Japan. I flew around the world, doing press conferences with local organizations and speaking out against the dolphin slaughter and the involvement of the dolphin-captivity industry in the hunts.
In the Dominican Republic, we worked with local activists to protest the proposed importation of a dozen dolphins caught in the Taiji drive hunt that were slated to be put in cages in Ocean World Casino and Aquarium. The Dominican government eventually agreed with us and refused to sanction the import. As a result, Earth Island Institute and I were promptly sued in 2008 for $460 million by Ocean World in Florida state court—lawsuits that, amazingly, drag on to this day. Of course, Ocean World doesn’t stand much of a chance of winning, but they mainly use the lawsuits as an excuse to harass us. Such lawsuits do not stop us from our work; they take up time, mounting a legal team (fortunately, a great law firm in Florida is representing us pro bono) and answering charges and numerous requests for documents, records, and interrogations.
One day, amid all this, I got a call from Louie Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer who had decided to become a filmmaker and was looking for his first subject. I turned out to be it, and I’m glad I was! As depicted in The Cove, Louie had noticed that I had been dropped as a keynote speaker from a conference sponsored by Sea World, the large oceanarium that houses most of the captive dolphins and orcas around the United States. Louie and I talked, and I invited him to join me in Taiji. He also had a chance to see our DVD, Welcome to Taiji.
The Cove was an amazing filmmaking experience. It is not only a highly entertaining movie that deserves every award it received, but also it takes on many complex issues—mercury contamination of the oceans, overfishing, dolphins in captivity, the machinations of the International Whaling Commission, and, of course, the killing of dolphins in Japan—and it gives those issues meaning and substance. I don’t have to explain what I do anymore; I just give people a copy of The Cove and say, “Watch this!” People who see the film get it, and they come out of the movie experience wanting to do something.
The film depicts the work of Louie and his crew in making the film as part of the storyline, a technical tour de force. Pierce Brosnan, who played the secret agent 007 in many James Bond films, told Louie that Louie had made the perfect Bond film—only, it was real! The film suggests that the crew went into the cove secretly on only two nights, but they actually went in more than fourteen times over a couple of years to place the secret cameras to catch footage of the dolphin slaughter, and then as many more times the following nights to pull the cameras out to check the footage. Louie did an extraordinary job of putting this all together, with a lot of help from veteran documentarian Fisher Stevens and financial support from Jim Clark, the inventor of Netscape. Their gamble with the documentary paid off, in terms of public exposure both inside and outside Japan. No question, The Cove will be around forever.
I had seen some of the rough cuts of the film, and it looked pretty good to me. But I was not really prepared for how the public would see it. In January 2009, The Cove first opened at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in a snowy Park City, Utah. The first screening was packed, and the film opened to an amazed audience. People were laughing, crying, getting emotional. At the end, the whole audience rose up and gave Louie, his film crew, and me a standing ovation. I have talked with many people who are veterans of the Sundance Film Festival, and they tell me that they have never ever seen an audience give a standing ovation to a documentary. And this continued—the film was screened eight more times that week for audiences that spontaneously rose up after the show to applaud. The Cove won Sundance’s Audience Award, which is voted on by the filmgoers themselves, and it won awards again and again at film festivals all over the world.
Fonda Berosini, a longtime Florida friend, also came on board through Take Part, a company formed in Los Angeles to promote films with a message via Participant Media. Thanks to Fonda and Take Part, our campaign was able to take advantage of technology like Twitter and cell phone texting, which got out the word to a broader international audience. They also helped develop our website and dolphin-protection websites in Japan.
The Cove and my role in it as an activist have become controversial in Japan. First screened in the fall of 2009 for two limited shows in Japan, the film was attacked by the fishermen of Taiji (who attended the second screening at the Tokyo Film Festival, along with representatives of the Japan Fisheries Agency), bolstered by extreme nationalist groups that have connections with the powerful fishermen’s unions, Japan’s underworld yakuza, and the Japanese Fisheries Agency. The nationalist groups have attacked the film as being “anti-Japanese,” which it is not. They have claimed there are errors in the film, but the errors they refer to are minor compared to the truth of the overall story. (Some statements in the film, for instance, have become outdated in the time between making the film and actually getting it out in public.) I also explain in media interviews in Japan that The Cove is not my movie—it was made by Psihoyos, Fisher, and their production team along with the Oceanic Preservation Society, so I can’t answer to the choices made by the filmmakers. Such petty quibbles with the film obscure the much more important issue: Why is Japan allowing the slaughter and eating of dolphins when the government knows the meat is contaminated with mercury and other poisons?
The nationalist opposition was so intimidating that several theaters in Japan at first backed out of screening The Cove because of the controversy. The film opened widely in Japanese theaters in July 2010, and I arrived there in June 2010 to help promote it, only to find the controversy at a boiling point. The film distributor in Japan, Unplugged, was doing its best to fight the opponents and save the film, while the nationalists were demonstrating in front of the home of the CEO of Unplugged. And these were not quiet, polite demonstrations—these were break-down-the-door-and-yell-using-amplified-megaphones demonstrations.
In response, Unplugged pulled together more than sixty Japanese artists, reporters, and filmmakers, who told a press conference that The Cove should be shown in Japan. The story in the media and on the Internet focusing on what was wrong with The Cove suddenly shifted into a dialog about censorship and freedom of speech in Japan. The nationalists had shot themselves in the foot. The theaters that had canceled came back, and The Cove is still showing, as I write this, in Japan.
Our campaign is distributing free copies of The Cove in Japan. We will continue to show up in Taiji during the dolphin-hunting season. And we will continue to work to bring the truth to the Japanese people and to the world. Even after all our work and attention on the cove, the dolphin killing persists to this day in Japan, and we will continue our campaign to stop it.
There will be a lot more to tell, about my work and the efforts of my colleagues at Earth Island Institute and other organizations, and, particularly, about the brave efforts by Japanese friends and colleagues who have had the courage to stand up and work on an issue that is very difficult, even threatening to their jobs and their lives. Some have had visits by the Japanese police; others have had nationalist demonstrators shouting outside their homes. One town councilman, who spearheaded enacting a ban on serving dolphin meat in school-lunch programs in Taiji, was ostracized and had to leave town, unable to continue to live there.
My son, Lincoln, and I have done a television series for Animal Planet called Blood Dolphin$, and I continue to work around the world to free captive dolphins and return them to the wild, while trying to shut down hunts like that in Taiji and other capture sites for dolphins.
When I first got involved in this issue, I talked with many colleagues in Japan. What was the best way to change what was happening? They told me about gai-atsu, which means “external pressure”: Japanese would change if the world put enough outside pressure on the government. While we continue to raise international pressure, at the same time, we are continuing to build support within Japan for change. The people of Japan, by and large, do not know that dolphins are being slaughtered in horrible ways. They are learning that now, through the impact of The Cove and our campaign, which have helped us lift the blackout on media stories.
The future of our campaign and of Japan dolphins is a tale for another book.
As I said earlier, it all started with a fictional dolphin named Flipper and a passion to free dolphins. We have made some progress since Behind the Dolphin Smile was first published. We have shut down a large number of aquariums holding dolphins and blocked imports and captures of wild dolphins in many areas. We have further been successful in blocking a number of new dolphinariums from ever being built. Still, swim-with-dolphin programs with captive animals in gross conditions have gained popularity worldwide, especially in the Caribbean, and dolphin slaughters continue in Japan, the Faroe Islands, and other areas. Our work is cut out for us.
Step by step, we are teaching new advocates for dolphins around the world. Our efforts to end the killing of dolphins and their enslavement in captivity will continue until we are successful. We owe it to them to keep trying.