Loving Dolphins To Death : Is Our Fascination With Marine Mammals Endangering Their Lives?

The sun is bright, the air heavy. It’s Easter, the busiest week of the year for Sea World’s mega-marine park in Orlando, Fla., and the huge whale and dolphin stadium is packed for the early afternoon show. For the crowd--shifting restlessly in Sea World hats and T-shirts--this will be the peak experience. They have chuckled over the antics of the penguins and walruses, gaped at the tropical fish and gasped at the razor-toothed sharks. But this is what they’ve come for. It’s the elusive mystique of the whales and dolphins that has drawn them here from all corners of the Eastern Seaboard on their spring vacations. * Hucksters move up and down the aisles, hawking fuzzy killer whale and dolphin puppets whose eyes wink in the sun, while below, behind the bright-blue stadium pool, the real animals circle nervously in small holding pens and exhale wetly, like human skin divers clearing their snorkels. * A metallic fanfare trumpets over the PA system, and from behind a glittery backdrop prance the trainers: blond, college-age men and women in colorful wet suits, waving to the crowd with pre-programmed smiles. Applause roars out from the bleachers; backs straighten, slack expressions tighten, and cameras rise to the ready.

Two beluga whales, two pseudo-orcas (false killer whales), two Pacific white-sided and two Atlantic bottlenose dolphins are released from their holding tanks and swim into the main pool. With a gush of sentimental music, Sea World’s “New Friends” show begins. Like the crowd, the animals are smiling--but not because they’re happy, necessarily, or because they’ve been trained to. Their jaw lines curve upward naturally. Those smiles, frozen into place by bone structure, have helped make them the star attractions at marine parks throughout the world for more than 35 years.

At the cues of trainers who toss fish and blow whistles, the animals perform a series of humanlike behaviors, nodding “yes” to questions, waving “hello” and “goodby” with their flippers and tails, “shaking hands” with and “kissing” nervous audience members and sidling up to the edge of the pool to “take a bow.” The crowd responds with breathless oohs and ahs: “Aren’t they magnificent!” “So intelligent!” “Look at that--they’re dancing to the music. Isn’t that cute!”

The climax is a spectacular water ballet. The whales and dolphins hurtle around the tank, faster and faster, then explode above the surface with a series of graceful flips and twisting dives. Applause echoes sharply off the corrugated-steel awning overhead, and some in the crowd even rise to their feet, clapping and whistling.

A powerful fascination draws us to the creatures dubbed “the humans of the sea” by marine biologist John Lilly, who conducted the first serious scientific studies of bottlenose dolphins, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. It is a mesmerizing, almost eerie sight when one of these creatures bobs up out of the water and fixes you with its piercing eyes--the warm-blooded gaze of a mammal emanating from the body of a fish. That dichotomy spawned myths of mermaids among ancient sailors and has continued to feed modern misconceptions about the animals’ “super intelligence.” Although researchers have discredited Lilly’s claims that cetaceans (whales and dolphins) are smarter than human beings--dolphins, it turns out, rate somewhere between dogs and apes on the intelligence scale--marine parks continue to promote the illusion that the creatures, with their frozen smiles, are somehow special. The business of first sharpening, then satisfying, the public’s hunger to see and touch these animals has spawned a cetacean gold rush, a multimillion-dollar industry whose outposts range from elaborate marine parks with Vegas-style shows and petting pools to “swim with dolphins” facilities at resort hotels and tiny tanks at seasonal amusement parks. Today, about 400 bottlenose dolphins and 18 killer whales are in captivity in the U.S., along with an estimated 80 other types of whales and dolphins.

Until the sluggish economy stalled the industry’s growth, it seemed that every community with a luxury hotel would soon have its own poolful of dolphins. There are 30 new marine parks on the drawing boards. But the remarkable growth of the cetacean entertainment industry has caused a backlash. Animal-rights groups have become increasingly worried that for these fragile animals, capture and life in captivity can only be torturous--or far too expensive to make humane on a large scale. Such fears have brought together a coalition of activists in a kind of “Free Flipper” movement that has worked, legally and illegally, to release captive dolphins and to regulate their captors’ actions. But, say some scientists, these groups--the most extreme of which oppose not only profit-making marine parks but also nonprofit aquariums and research facilities that study whales and dolphins--also exploit romantic illusions about cetaceans, in this case, to push a far broader agenda into the public spotlight. After all, says one marine-mammal veterinarian who asked not to be identified, “you can train a pig to do more things than you can train a dolphin to do. But how many people look at the bacon on their plate and think, ‘What have we done?’ ”

The deaths of large numbers of dolphins in the wild caused federal officials to put a moratorium on dolphin captures last year, and none of the animals were taken from the wild in 1990. But now, as the government prepares to resume authorizing captures and begins to revise the guidelines for captivity, a disturbing question has become the centerpiece of the debate over the relationship between humans and cetaceans: How can we keep from loving these animals to death?

KELLY WILLIAMS, A RESIDENT OF OCEAN SPRINGS, MISS., NEVER STOPPED to wonder how the dolphins at the local marine park came to be in those show tanks in the first place. She’d grown up watching “Flipper,” read John Lilly’s books, and become fascinated with the animals, eventually landing a job at Marine Life, a park in Gulfport, Miss., in the spring of 1983. She thought it would be like what she’d seen in movies and shows; she envisioned herself forming a close bond with the dolphins, one of mutual love and respect.

But she got a rude awakening that June, when she accompanied a crew of Marine Life trainers and divers on an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico to capture more dolphins for the park.

As Williams tells the story, the trouble began when the capture team--which included three boats and a spotter plane circling overhead--surrounded a pod of 13 dolphins in shallow water. Setting nets on a pod can be risky: Once dolphins realize they are trapped, they often panic and charge the net, entangling themselves and twirling violently in an effort to break free. The capture team would have a difficult time handling all the dolphins should they hit the net simultaneously; without someone there to untangle them, the dolphins could rip their flippers off, gouge out their own eyes or worse.

But Mobashir “Moby” Solangi, the marine biologist who is Marine Life’s curator, was, according to crew members present, eager to set the nets. He overrode the protests of crew members who argued against going after the pod, ex-staffers remember, and ordered the main boat, the Sawfish, to let out its net.

The dolphins huddled together, confused by the turbulence of the circling boats, unaware that they’d been trapped until the net closed around them. Suddenly, a mother and her calf--which Williams remembers as being about a week or two weeks old and Solangi recalls being closer to a year old--panicked and charged the net. Both animals thrashed and spun, tangling themselves up in the net. The more they struggled, the tighter the rope web became, dragging them below the surface.

Mike Woods, the park’s director of training at the time, and another trainer, John Fishback, dove in and rushed to untangle the calf first. Woods had cut the young animal loose and begun guiding it out to open water when Solangi ordered him to bring it aboard the Sawfish. Solangi wanted to ensure that the process of freeing the mother wouldn’t be complicated by the calf’s swimming back into the net. The calf was brought on board and placed on a foam pad, exposed to the full force of gravity for the first time in its life. Kelly Williams laid a wet a sheet over its back and tried to calm it while the crew moved to free the mother.

“The baby was screaming and hollering for its mother, lifting its head up,” Williams recalls. “And the mother (in the water) was screaming for it. . . . I’m trying to keep it wet and calm. . . . It was just like taking a human baby from its mother. The baby was screaming, and you could see the fear in its eyes. . . . It was horrible.”

In the water, Woods and Fishback finally managed to free the mother. “I swam the mother out to the perimeter, lowered the net, and we released her,” Fishback recalls. “The mother stayed at the perimeter of the net. She was screaming--sharp, high-pitched screeches. The baby was going into shock at that point. The mother kept her nose at the net. The baby’s breathing became very shallow and quick and irregular.”

Solangi allowed Woods to take the calf back into the water, but it was too late. “Woods started to walk with it in an attempt to bring it out of shock,” Fishback says. “He failed. It died within the perimeter of the net, minutes after he grabbed it and tried to revive it in the water. It just stopped breathing.”

“The mother kept screaming, even after the baby died,” says Williams, who is now an anti-captivity activist. “It was horrible. Everybody was crying.”

The baby’s corpse was brought back on board the boat and laid on the foam pad beside the other live dolphins taken from the pod. The mother still hovered in the water at the side of the boat, long after the other dolphins that had been released fled; she stayed there until the Sawfish crew hauled in its net and headed for port.

Solangi says he regrets the baby’s death but insists that every precaution was taken to ensure the safety of the animals. Every dolphin catcher in the business risks losing a few in accidental drownings, or to capture shock, says Solangi. It goes with the territory. He explains Williams’ horror at this memory as the oversensitive response of a romantic amateur. “She was the type of person who thought that Flipper just came in (to captivity voluntarily), you didn’t have to train him or anything. Her idea about animals was very different from when you handle animals in captivity.”

RICHARD O’BARRY DID HANDLE ANIMALS IN CAPTIVITY. THE PRINCIPAL trainer at Miami Seaquarium, where the original “Flipper” television show was filmed, he knew firsthand what it took to turn a wild animal into a performer. But, in 1970 he also learned firsthand what that process could cost. That year, Kathy, one of the dolphins that portrayed Flipper, died in his arms.

While bottlenose dolphins may live 20 or even 40 years in the wild, Kathy had survived just six years in captivity. O’Barry was certain that the stress of confinement had slowly killed her. A week after Kathy died, he was jailed for attempting to cut a captive dolphin loose from a fenced-in lagoon on Bimini in the Bahama Islands. It was the start of a 20-year campaign, and in the decades since, O’Barry has become the most vocal and visible opponent of cetacean captivity.

“Captivity is slow torture,” O’Barry says. “These animals have been deprived of their freedom, removed from the open ocean and stuck in concrete chlorinated boxes. Most of them don’t make it; most die after only a few years in those tanks.”

Statistics gathered by the National Marine Fisheries Service indicate that O’Barry may have a point. Thirty-six percent of the 414 Atlantic bottlenose dolphins caught or born into captivity since 1980 have already died.

Unfortunately, few reliable data exist on wild populations of these species, and while scientists know or can estimate the age of the oldest animals, there is no way of knowing how many wild dolphins and whales die before reaching maturity, or what the average life span of their overall populations might be. Cetaceans face many hazards in the wild: pollution, sharks, parasites, stiff competition for food, whaling boats, tuna nets, and gill and drift nets. It’s possible that their average life span in the wild is as low or even lower than it is in captivity.

But those who oppose captivity paint a grim picture of the horrors facing cetaceans when they come in contact with some parts of the marine-park industry. First, as Kelly Williams learned, there is the shock of capture. Marine Animal Productions (MAP) in Gulfport, Miss. (parent company to Marine Life, the marine park where Williams worked), is the largest commercial dolphin-catching operation in the United States and possibly the world. Before the moratorium on captures, MAP collected as many as 20 or 30 dolphins a year for the U.S. Navy, research facilities and marine parks in the United States, Canada and Europe. MAP nets large pods of dolphins and loads as many as four at a time onto a large boat for a trip back to port.

Sometimes the other boats will hold the remaining dolphins in a net until the capture boat can return for a second load, enabling MAP to take as many as eight dolphins in a single day. (Many times that number may have been netted and examined, even brought on board the boat, before being rejected as unsuitable specimens.) While a veterinarian is now part of every capture team, Solangi says, some of those attending the dolphins may be inexperienced, like Williams, and unable to detect the first warning signs of an animal going into shock.

Former divers and trainers who took part in MAP capture operations recall many incidents in which dolphins died of shock or drowned in the nets. In most cases, they say, they were ordered to simply dump the corpses back into the open ocean. “The babies were always the ones that got to me,” says Don Potter, a former MAP diver who participated in more than 20 captures. “We pulled (dead) babies out (of the nets) quite a bit.” Solangi disputes that account, saying he has lost only six dolphins during his career.

Some of the 11 other licensed dolphin catchers in the United States have used capture methods that can be difficult to control. Before the moratorium, Gulf World, a small marine park in Panama City Beach, Fla., caught bottlenose with a “beach seining” method: The capture boat surrounds a pod with a huge mile-long net, then pulls the mammals up into shallow water along with sharks, stingrays and whatever else the net drags in. Opponents of the procedure say using such large nets makes it difficult to keep dolphins from tangling in the net and drowning. Brad Miller, co-owner of Gulf World, however, says that “our method is the one of the safest. A dolphin has never been entangled, and a dolphin has never died.”

No one disputes the fact that capture, however it is done, puts cetaceans under stress, and once the the animals have been taken from the wild, they face the challenge of adjusting to life in a concrete pool or fenced-in lagoon. Accustomed to eating a wide variety of live fish, most refuse to eat dead fish at first and must be force-fed. Some will die in the first 90 days, which the National Marine Fisheries Service designates as the crucial period in an animal’s adjustment to captivity. A 1989 report by the Center for Coastal Studies, a nonprofit research organization based in Provincetown, Mass., found that of the 431 bottlenose dolphins caught or born in captivity between 1975 and 1987, 30 (about 7%) died within the first three months. Another 52 dolphins were released into the wild shortly after capture, either because they proved to be undesirable display specimens, refused to eat or otherwise failed to adapt to captivity. (Many more dolphins are subjected to the stress of being netted but then released as unsuitable specimens. Between 1981 and 1984, MAP netted 273 dolphins and kept only 34 for captivity.)

Even after their initial adjustment, whales and dolphins may not be in the clear. The experience of capture can seriously weaken their immune systems and leave them vulnerable to infectious diseases. “Some of them will get adrenal burn-out,” says Bob Foley, a veterinarian in the Florida Keys who has worked extensively with captive dolphins. “Their system will release adrenalin and hormones from the adrenal gland and (the dolphin) will go into adrenal exhaustion. Blood sugar shoots sky high, pulse rate goes up--the fight-or-flight reflex. Often it ends up exhausting the adrenal glands. After (the capture) they have an abnormal or non-production of (some) chemicals.”

This might help explain why such a large number of dolphins die during their first two years in captivity. A study by the National Marine Fisheries Service tracking bottlenose dolphins captured between 1966 and 1972 found that only 50% survived more than two years. Another, by the Center for Coastal Studies, tracked 89 dolphins captured between 1975 and 1977. A total of 27, more than 30%, died within the first two years.

The good news is that the animals most suited to captivity, those that make it past the two-year mark, are likely to adjust to their new surroundings and live well into their 20s, 30s and even 40s. But longevity may simply be a sentence to a harsh life. Under federal law, the smallest allowable living space for a single bottlenose dolphin is a 24x24-foot enclosure that’s at least 6 feet deep. That’s not much room for a 12-foot, 400-pound animal that may travel up to 100 miles a day in the open ocean, yet the Navy and many marginal marine parks keep dolphins in pens and tanks that small.

Such captivity may affect cetaceans behaviorally. “It’s like putting people in a prison camp where they’re confined to small areas, which affects the brain,” says George Baker, a Florida veterinarian who’s treated captive dolphins. “It causes pathology, neurotic behavior. . . . They chew on each other, there are aggressive behaviors all the time.” Stress-related stomach ulcers are a chronic problem. According to trainers and veterinarians in the marine-park industry, as many as half of all captive dolphins are treated regularly with anti-ulcer medication.

The strong possibility that capture and captivity will harm cetaceans means just one thing to animal-rights radicals. “My feeling is that captivity is wrong,” says Ben White, the Atlantic director of Sea Shepherd, a militant environmental group famous for ramming whaling ships and scuttling them in their harbors. “I liken it to a slave trade, and my stand is abolitionist: It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong!”

MANY OF THE VETERINARIANS and trainers who work with dolphins both at research facilities and in the sea-park industry view the notion of a cetacean slave trade with some irony. “There are a lot worse things (than captivity) going on for marine mammals right now,” says Timothy Desmond, former president of the International Marine Mammal Training Assn. “It really has made me wonder. . . . You’re talking about a relatively small number of animals whose use is, if they’re handled right, appropriate.” On the other hand, he points out, thousands of marine mammals are still dying in fishermen’s drift and gill nets in the Pacific. “Why aren’t we paying attention to that?” he asks.

Many at marine parks and oceanariums argue that the abolitionists’ worst-case descriptions of how cetaceans are captured and cared for ignore the fact that the animals can be, and frequently are, treated humanely.

Some methods of catching dolphins, for example, can greatly reduce the risks of capture, if not completely eliminate them. Along the coast of California, some trappers use a hoop net for catching Pacific white-sided dolphins and other species. Instead of surrounding an entire pod, catchers lure a dolphin into riding their boat’s bow wave, then slip a small net over its head. The dolphin tows a small buoy attached to the net for 10 to 15 minutes, until it gets tired. Then it is brought alongside the boat, fitted into a sling and slowly raised out of the water.

If the animal exhibits any signs of going into shock--shallow breathing, muscle tremors, arching its back--it is immediately lowered into the water and held at the surface until it calms down. If it continues to breathe rapidly, the animal is released. Morris Wintermantel used a hoop net to catch more than 200 dolphins--at least one from every species in the waters between California and Hawaii--before retiring after 20 years as a biologist for the U.S. Navy. He lost only two animals to capture shock.

“I’ve been catching dolphins for almost 25 years,” says John Hall, a former staff scientist at Hubbs Marine Research Center in San Diego who specializes in cetaceans. Hall has used a hoop net to catch dolphins for research facilities including Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz. “I’ve never had a fatality.”

Hall, Wintermantel and others also take only one dolphin at a time, so that an animal receives the full attention of the crew and a veterinarian.

That kind of care isn’t unique to research scientists. Jay Sweeney, based in San Diego, co-owns Dolphin Services International, the second-largest dolphin-catching operation in the United States. Sweeney--one of the world’s leading marine-mammal veterinarians--generally uses conservative methods for catching dolphins. He’s never captured more than two or three dolphins on a given day; he personally monitors the animals for signs of shock and supervises their adjustment to captivity. “If I don’t like the way an animal is developing, I always err on the side of safety and release it,” he says. “We have never killed an animal in a capture operation.”

Ideally, once a dolphin is captured, it should be kept in an environment that closely approximates its natural habitat--or at least gives the animal room to move. “We would like to see a movement in the marine-mammal industry similar to that in the zoo-animal business, where dolphins are (placed in) larger, open-ocean, natural saltwater environments, to get them out from behind bars and concrete walls,” says Rae Stone, a biologist who is co-owner of the top-of-the-line “swim with dolphins” facility, Dolphin Quest, at the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa in Hawaii.

Dolphin Quest holds six bottlenose dolphins in the largest captive habitat in the world. Its five-acre, man-made lagoon has a natural tidal flow, a lava-rock bottom and is filled with native fish and plants.

Another new facility, at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, has a 1.5-million-gallon tank holding five bottlenose dolphins. The complex’s series of connected pools has a free-form design with undulating surfaces that approximate the dolphins’ natural environment.

These new facilities place a greater emphasis on education. Anthropomorphic tricks--”waving” to and “kissing” audience members, “dancing” to music--are being phased out in favor of presentations on the animals’ biology, behavior and the threats they face in the wild.

Some scientists are now talking about the possibility of establishing regional breeding centers--dolphin farms--that would eventually eliminate the need for capturing more animals.

Compared to living in the open ocean, says Brad Andrews, vice president and assistant zoological director of Sea World in Florida, life in captivity is a Club Med vacation. “In the wild, animals are driven to find food,” he says. “Here it’s provided for them. They don’t have to search that much for their food. . . . They don’t have to worry about breeding . . . protecting their young.”

Frequently, facilities that entertain and educate the public with displays of cetaceans also allow scientists to observe these animals under controlled conditions. Researchers are able to conduct not only studies that tell us more about cetaceans’ use of sonar, their intelligence and how they communicate but also biological studies that could benefit wild populations.

Gregory Bossart, the veterinary pathologist for the Miami Seaquarium, is studying the immune systems of captive dolphins to help solve the mystery of massive die-offs in which hundreds of animals have washed up dead on American shores. Biologists theorize that the animals’ immune systems have been weakened--by pollution, perhaps, or by an AIDS-type virus--leaving them vulnerable to a host of diseases. And researchers such as Bossart, studying the animals under controlled conditions possible only in captivity, hope to find ways to keep the wild dolphins alive.

John McCosker, director of the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, which has two dolphins, reluctantly concludes that the benefits of capturing and studying cetaceans outweigh the costs. “Every day I come to work and think about it,” he says. “I look at them, and I anguish a little. I feel sad for them, yet at the same time, they’d be cat food if it weren’t for the fact that awful shows like ‘Flipper’ and the best (oceanariums) and even some of the other institutions that display them enlightened the public that these weren’t just big fish.”

NAVIGATING BETWEEN PRO-and anti-captivity forces is the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is responsible for protecting the health and safety of both wild and captive whales and dolphins in U.S. territory. Before 1972, when Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, anyone with a boat and a net could go out and lasso a dolphin. In the early ‘60s, people would buy bottlenose dolphins from Miami Seaquarium for $350, load them into the back of station wagons, take them home and stick them in back-yard swimming pools. When a dolphin died at the Seaquarium, trainers simply dumped the body and went out to catch another.

There’s no question the situation has improved over the past 18 years. The fisheries service sets quotas on the numbers of dolphins that can be captured in U.S. waters and bases those quotas on estimates of wild populations, so that, in theory, they will not be depleted. Today, dolphin trappers must file for a permit, specifying the age, size, sex and species of the dolphins or whales they intend to take and where the captures will take place. After marine mammals are captured, a trapper must report how many animals were accidentally killed during the operation, and that number is deducted from the total the catcher is permitted to take. Those who fail to report deaths, or who commit acts of negligence or cruelty, may be fined or have their permits revoked.

There are also captivity guidelines regulating the size of tanks and pens, water and food quality, and health care.

It sounds like a good system. But the fisheries service has failed to enforce it. Until last June, the agency did not require inspectors to observe dolphin catchers, relying instead on reports filed by the catchers themselves. It rarely sent independent veterinarians out to verify the circumstances of cetacean deaths. And current and former trainers, divers and veterinarians report that capture and necropsy reports were frequently fictionalized to cover up deaths and negligence.

If a death was admitted to, the collectors or oceanariums involved rarely accepted the blame. Take, for example, the dolphin that died in Kelly Williams’ arms. Some might attribute the fatality to capture shock--a death caused by the stress of capture--but MAP’s Solangi says his necropsy revealed the calf suffered from chronic ongoing pneumonia. The fisheries service accepted that explanation. There’s no point in falsifying death reports, Solangi says. “As a scientist myself, I need to know what actually transpired so we can learn from it and help better manage the animals,” he explains. “Why would a reasonable mind, after so much time and effort and expense, have an animal, not even take care of it, and when it dies not even know what it died of?”

The new requirement that federal observers be present on every boat during a collection should help sort out the discrepancies between official and unofficial accounts of events at sea. But the agency’s monitoring in other areas hasn’t always proven to be thorough. Many of the inspectors who visit marine parks are dog and cat vets who inspect everything from chicken farms to fish hatcheries. They’re so overworked they may visit a marine-mammal facility only once a year. In Florida, O’Barry discovered captive dolphins living in tanks at the Clearwater Marine Science Center, and at Ocean World in Fort Lauderdale, that were smaller than the minimum standards--a fact that had gone unnoticed by inspectors who had been visiting Clearwater for five years and Ocean World for 17. The fisheries service has closed down only one marine park, Sealand of Cape Cod, and then only after all of Sealand’s dolphins had died.

Anyone hoping to use agency records to make informed decisions about the effects of capture and captivity on marine mammals will quickly discover another flaw in the system. Last June, reporters from the Orlando Sentinel found that the agency’s records on bottlenose dolphins were so chaotic that it was nearly impossible to track the lives of individual animals. The fisheries service has four different tallies for the number of dolphins captured in the 1980s, and employees admit that the agency has never kept track of the number of capture-shock incidents.

“The bottom line is that the ability of the government or anyone else to completely and accurately trace the life of a captive dolphin is largely a matter of luck,” the Sentinel concluded. And that knowledge has pushed some activists to take matters into their own hands.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, SEA Shepherd’s Ben White organized a “Dolphin Brigade” of middle-class housewives, retired businessmen and college students with one thing in common: an evangelical zeal to set all captive dolphins free. On Aug. 8, the group converged at Mexico Beach, on the coast of the Florida panhandle near Panama City, where Gulf World was preparing to capture six bottlenose dolphins.

For three days the brigade trailed the capture boats with an inflatable boat and a small launch. When the trappers netted dolphins and attempted to haul them ashore, brigade members climbed into the net and stopped them. The conflict drew intense media coverage. Two days later, the Gulf World crew finally netted a pair of dolphins and loaded them onto a boat. Sea Shepherd had lost the battle, but it was only the first in what may be a protracted war.

In the fall, White assembled his team again, this time in Charlotte Harbor, Fla., where Jay Sweeney planned to trap six bottlenose dolphins for Baltimore’s National Aquarium. This time the brigade fanned out through the community, alerting the media and local residents.

Almost overnight the citizens of Charlotte Harbor mobilized. “They took over the whole thing,” says brigade member Ellen Mueller. “Everybody was out in their little boats watching for them.” It became a statewide issue when Sweeney, trying to avoid the controversy, moved his operation to Tampa Bay, 100 miles to the north, where he captured two dolphins and transported them south to Hawk’s Cay, a luxury resort in the Florida Keys. Sweeney’s maneuver inflamed public opinion. Environmentalists descended on Hawk’s Cay demanding freedom for the “Tampa Two.” Baltimore got its dolphins, but Florida activists have made their coastline unattractive territory for dolphin catchers.

Activist groups have also begun to take legal action to force government agencies to do more to protect the animals. In 1989, the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, the Animal Welfare Society, the Animal Welfare Protection Institute and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund filed lawsuits to try to block importations of Beluga whales from Canada and pseudo-orcas from Japan. Pressure from this same coalition has nudged the fisheries service into finally tightening the reins on parts of the cetacean industry.

The agency put the brakes on “swim with dolphins” operations after a series of public hearings last fall at which animal-rights activists expressed concerns about the stresses created when captive dolphins have to share their pools with as many as 30 humans a day. No new swim programs will be permitted until the agency has had a chance to study their long-term impact on captive dolphins.

The uproar stirred by activists has been great enough to make some trappers relocate to the Caribbean, outside of U.S. waters, where they can catch bottlenose for both the American and foreign markets, unfettered by fisheries service regulations. MAP recently opened a “swim with dolphins” facility on Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras, adjacent to a luxury resort that caters to American tourists. MAP’s Solangi leaves open the possibility that it will also be used as the base for a capture operation.

But the abolitionists are hot on their trail. Last summer the Dolphin Rescue Brigade struck at the Treasure Key resort in the Bahamas, dismantling 333 feet of wire fencing in a dolphin pen and releasing six of 11 dolphins recently caught for the hotel’s “swim with dolphins” program. Since then, O’Barry has been working to build an anti-captivity movement in the Bahamas.

The issue, says O’Barry, “is not so much the 400 captive dolphins in the 38 marine (facilities) in the United States. It’s the 200 million people who have been miseducated, desensitized into thinking that’s where those dolphins belong. . . . In a world where so much that is wild and free has already been lost to us, we must leave these beautiful mammals free. . . . They do us no harm, they wish us none, and we should let them alone.”