Documenting Dolphin Slaughter

Two decades ago, a film made from undercover video footage shot by biologist Sam LaBudde showed dolphins being slaughtered in nets by a Panamanian tuna boat. The footage so outraged Ani Moss that the former model convinced her husband Jerry Moss, a founder of A&M Records, to meet with the head of the H.J. Heinz Company, the world’s largest tuna manufacturer. Over the next several months, the company was persuaded to stop buying tuna caught in nets that kill dolphins. It was one of the environmental movement's finest hours.

From the 1960s until then, an estimated 7 million dolphins had died in tuna nets. But prompted by the video shot by LaBudde, who used a mere eight-millimeter camcorder, eventually all of the major tuna manufacturers agreed to buy only tuna certified “dolphin-safe,” thereby reducing dolphin kills by 95 percent.

The Sam LaBudde story is part of history now, but dolphin activists are hopeful that a new documentary, The Cove, about to open in movie theaters across the United States at the end of this month, will help put an end to another outrage.

About 25,000 dolphins are killed each year in a heavily guarded cove near the Japanese coastal town of Taiji. Officially sanctioned by the Japan government as a "pest control" measure, fishermen trap dolphins inside a cove and butcher them with knives and spears. Why pest control? They consider dolphins to be pests because they're competing with fisherman for fish. Many of the dead dolphins, which are said to be heavily contaminated with mercury according to environmentalists, are later passed off in Japanese cities as whale meat, which for some in Japan is a delicacy.

Ric O’Barry, leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition, and National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos went to extraordinary lengths to document these killings in the Taiji cove. They used cameras hidden in fake rocks made by Industrial Light & Magic, the same crew that made the special effects in the Star Wars films.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Psihoyos said they tried to make a new kind of documentary. “The idea was to make a film that's going to engage people using the documentary medium, but I think we stumbled on something different," he said. "Most documentaries feel like you're taking medicine. We [made] a film that sort of organically became an action adventure thriller without really intending to.”

Judging from the movie’s trailers, reviews and several awards at TheCoveMovie.Com, this looks like a must-see movie. Now, if only a well-connected Japanese version of Ani Moss could see this.

Photo courtesy of SaveJapanDolphins.Org.