Letter to the Editor

With a dolphin park on its way, has ‘Freedom’ really died in Cayman?

Friday, April 2, 2004

Dear Sir,

On 21 March the Florida-based One Voice Dolphin Rescue team received a phone call from Billy Adam who is spearheading the campaign to stop the establishment of captive dolphin facilities in the Cayman Islands.

Our help was needed immediately, he said. Two men had found a young dolphin in the water off South Sound Road, Grand Cayman.

According to eyewitnesses, the dolphin had stranded himself in shallow water and wasn’t moving much.

We travelled to Grand Cayman immediately but, sadly, the dolphin died. He was only a few months old. Somehow he got separated from his mother and the rest of his pod, but we don’t know exactly what had brought him ashore.

Billy Adam, Juliet Austin, Curtis Eldemire, local veterinarians Dr Brenda Bush and Dr Elizabeth Broussard as well as Gina Ebanks-Petrie, Head of the Department of Environment, were among the team of care-givers who did everything possible to save the young dolphin.

Several people, including grown-ups, started crying when they realised the dolphin was dead.

Although it was a sad scene, it was also one of tremendous hope and encouragement for the One Voice team. We had just returned from a very difficult campaign in Taiji, Japan, where whalers intentionally drive hundreds of dolphins ashore and kill them in the most gruesome way imaginable.

In a method known as “dolphin drives,” the whalers drive the dolphins into a lagoon. They seal the mouth of the lagoon with nets, and with the animals trapped in a small area it’s an easy task for them to drive the dolphins into shallow water and drive fishermen’s hooks and knives into their bodies, bleeding them to death.

The dolphins take several minutes to die, and as the water turns red with blood they thrash about in pain, emitting loud whistles and cries.

One day we witnessed the capture of more than 100 bottlenose dolphins. We were shocked to see whalers and dolphin trainers working side by side netting and beaching the panic-stricken animals.

The trainers spent several hours selecting the dolphins they wanted for their dolphinariums. Dragging the dolphins ashore with ropes, they separated mothers from their babies with extreme brutality.

The air filled with the dolphins’ cries of distress, but they were met with complete indifference from the trainers. They simply picked out the ones they wanted and let the whalers do whatever they wanted with the rest.

Some of the dolphins that were not selected by the dolphin captivity industry were butchered for human consumption, while others, according to official records, were let go.

How many of them had been inflicted with life-threatening injuries as a result of the ordeal, we will never know. Some showed signs of broken or
dislocated pectoral fins. Others, succumbing to exhaustion, shock, or injuries, simply sank to the bottom of the sea, never to surface again.

“We love dolphins.” This is the dolphin captivity industry’s first line of defence when confronted with the highly questionable ethics of capturing and confining dolphins.

Their second line of defence is: “We are displaying dolphins to teach the public respect for nature.”

This is the hypocrisy that dolphin captivity is based upon. There was no sign of “love” or “respect” for dolphins on this day where dolphin trainers and whalers in a joint effort captured and stranded an entire pod of full-grown dolphins, juveniles, babies, as well as pregnant and nursing females and subsequently, in a process that can only be described as a display of horror, dragged more than 20 of them away to be shipped to various dolphinariums.

We kept looking at the dolphin trainers, hoping to see a sign of some compassion. But there was none. The trainers that were not chasing after the dolphins with ropes, simply stood by and watched as some of the dolphins, in a massive effort to escape, got entangled in the capture nets and, unable to reach the surface to breathe, died a slow and painful death of suffocation.

In their self-serving endeavour to choose the dolphins that best fit the desired criteria for dolphin shows and captive dolphin swim programmes such as the ones proposed for the Cayman Islands, these dolphin trainers knowingly and calculatingly exposed dolphins to trauma, injuries, and death.

Indeed, the violence of a dolphin capture is the dark side of dolphin captivity that the public, including the people of the Cayman Islands, is never told about by those who seek to make a profit from these victim animals.

With the brutal scenes of Taiji still fresh in our minds, the scene we encountered on South Sound was such a remarkable contrast.

In Grand Cayman we saw compassionate and caring people coming together in an extraordinary effort to save a dolphin, with the ultimate goal of releasing him back into the sea and reuniting him with his mother.

To the many volunteers that comforted the dolphin in his final hours, he became a reminder that these free-ranging and highly intelligent marine mammals belong in the wild, and that it is cruel to separate them from the
three most important aspects of their lives: Their world of sound, their pod members, and their ability to move freely. With this in mind, they named the dolphin “Freedom.”

To our knowledge, there are several proposals to bring captive dolphins to the Cayman Islands. If the authorities approve the import of captive dolphins, your beautiful island nation will become part of the dolphin trade that nourishes its profits from deadly dolphin captures; a procedure that leaves dolphin pods traumatised and destroyed.

The Cayman Islands will become supportive of an exploitative entertainment industry that treats nature and its inhabitant in a manner that works directly against the caring approach to nature we saw demonstrated on South Sound the day “Freedom” died.

Compassion and dedication will be replaced with crudeness and greed. An admirable effort to save life will be replaced with the act of permanently destroying it by subjecting it to a violent capture and lifelong confinement.

The “Keep Dolphins Free in the Cayman Islands” campaign continues. As dolphin freedom advocate Juliet Austin puts it: “‘Freedom’ died but in his death brought new life to our efforts to keep the Cayman Islands on the list of tourist destinations that, rather than exploit captive dolphins for profit, celebrate the dolphins’ way of life in their vast marine environment, wild and free.”

Helene O’Barry
Field Correspondent
One Voice
France

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