© UnknownCan you imagine being in a small concrete enclosure for your life when you're used to swimming 40 miles a day?
On Monday June 6th American activist Richard "Ric" O'Barry appeared on the Dutch talk show
RTL Late Night and spoke about how miserable dolphins (and other sea mammals) are in marine mammal parks. O'Barry first started out as a dolphin trainer for the Miami Seaquarium, and helped with the capture of dolphins. At a later point, he trained the five dolphins who starred in the TV show
Flipper. Based on his years of experience training these intelligent sea mammals, he concluded that capturing dolphins and training them to perform tricks is wrong.
During the talk show, O'Barry
said:
Host: When your dolphin, Flipper, as we call her, died in your arms, was that a turning point when you decided: "Okay, I don't want to be a trainer anymore, I want to be an activist"?
Ric O'Barry: It was a tipping point, but I had very strong feelings that led up to that. Because I was literally living with the dolphins for seven years. [...] You really get to know them, you get to know their body language. You can tell they're depressed. You're not fooled by that dolphin's smile anymore. That dolphin's smile is nature's greatest deception.
A good example is the Hagenbeck - zoo which is closed, by the way, because protesters were there every Sunday - where Sinbad one day jumped on the stage, like they do, and had a heart attack and died right on the stage. But the audience doesn't know that information. They see a dolphin laying on the stage just like that [points at a picture of a 'smiling' dolphin] with a big smile, and they're applauding a dead dolphin. It's just an example of how this industry is based on this optical illusion that dolphins smile.
In front of O'Barry sat Niels van Elk, marine biologist and vet of the Dolfinarium (marine mammal park in Harderwijk, the Netherlands). According to van Elk, when dolphins play in the Dolfinarium or in another zoo, it indicates that they are doing well, because if they didn't feel that way, they wouldn't play. O'Barry replied saying that these dolphins from captive breeding in the Dolfinarium have "never seen a live fish in their lives, they don't know what the current is, they don't know what the tide is, they think that the ceiling is the sky." He emphasized that "
these are 'freaks' we've created for our amusement."
Comment: See also: String of likely bear attacks claims fourth victim in Japan