Sea of blood as Japan slaughters thousands of dolphins

Despite the efforts of the Japanese authorities to keep it hidden, the massacre has been captured on film by a guerrilla documentary team led by the man who trained Flipper.

Until now, the yearly slaughter of 2,000 dolphins in a small town in Japan has been one of the country's most shameful secrets. But The Cove – a new documentary shot in the style of an espionage thriller – is about to change all that. The film follows the attempts of an American documentary team to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding the annual dolphin 'drive' in the fishing town of Taiji.

Here, in the drive season between September and March, fishermen set out in motorised vessels to locate the pods of dolphins following their primordial migratory patterns along Japan's south-eastern Pacific coast. Banging on metal poles suspended from the sides of the boats, the fishermen confuse the dolphins' sonar, and drive them into the hidden cove of the film's title. There, dealers size up young females to sell on to marine parks and dolphinaria. The remainder are brutally slaughtered by fishermen using knives and spears in a bloody massacre – which turns the waters red – to be sold either as dolphin, or more often 'whale', meat.

Employing an arsenal of hi-tech gadgetry including thermal-imaging equipment and cameras disguised as rocks, the makers of The Cove capture the slaughter in the face of obstacles that include barbed-wire fences, irate fishermen and an increasingly frustrated local police force. The film has already become an international cause célèbre. Earlier this year it won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival; it has received laudatory reviews in America, and in Australia it has led to Taiji's 'sister town', Broome, temporarily suspending relations following a public outcry. It has yet to secure a distributor in Japan.

But the star turn of The Cove is not the divers planting underwater sonar equipment in the cove, nor the cameramen in their camouflage and face-paint crawling through undergrowth to film the hunt, nor even the poor benighted dolphins. It is a baggy-eyed, white-haired man of 70 named Ric O'Barry. In the 1960s O'Barry was famous as the trainer of Flipper the dolphin – or rather the five dolphins who played the role in the television series that did more than anything to convey the idea of dolphins as cute, lovable, intelligent creatures ready to help man out of a tight fix.

Flipper can be seen as the progenitor of the business in captive performing dolphins – a business that, O'Barry is fond of saying, he spent 10 years of his life building up and the past 40 years doing his utmost to tear down. His campaigning on behalf of dolphins has taken him around the world, on several occasions to jail. For the past six years he has concentrated on Taiji, where his efforts to halt the drive have earned him the bitter enmity of local fishermen.

Our first sight of O'Barry in The Cove is of him driving through the town hunched over the wheel of his hire car, wearing a mask and a slouch hat and announcing, 'Today they would kill me if they could. And I'm not exaggerating.' Which prompts the question: if they wanted to do that before The Cove came out, what would they do to him now?

On September 1, the first day of the dolphin hunting season, I joined O'Barry on the bus that was carrying him from the city of Osaka, where he had landed from America the previous night, back to Taiji for the first time since The Cove's release. Travelling with him were his son Lincoln; a television crew from the Discovery Channel, which is making a series about O'Barry's work as a dolphin advocate; and Mark Palmer, the associate director of the International Marine Mammal Project, run by the environmental group Earth Island Institute – which is nominally O'Barry's employer.

In the five-hour drive from Osaka, we had already stopped at the Kumano Hongu Taisha temple, where a Shinto priest had led prayers for the dolphin hunt to be suspended. Now, as the bus rounded a corner on the coastal road and Taiji came into view, O'Barry fretted about two things: whether the prayers had been answered, and exactly what sort of reception awaited him. 'I don't know whether or not I'm going to get arrested,' he said. 'They really don't like me in this town.' He paused. 'Actually, going to jail might not be such a bad idea. At least I'd be able to relax.'

Taiji, with a population of 3,500, was once the most important centre for whaling in Japan, its history memorialised at every turn. A lifesize statue of a humpback whale and her calf greets you as you drive into town. There is a whaling museum and dolphinarium. Tourist boats shaped like dolphins ply the waters in the bay, and on every shop and restaurant front there are cartoon images of happy, smiling cetaceans in a style the Japanese know as kawaii – cute. It is a town that appears to cherish dolphins. But its fishermen defend dolphin hunting as part of their culture, to provide meat and as a necessary measure to control the number of dolphins which, they claim, decimate fish stocks.

O'Barry first came to Taiji in 1975 when the international 'save the whale' campaign was at its height. A key strategy of that campaign was the call to boycott Japanese goods. O'Barry was a vehement opponent of whaling, but was equally vehement in his opposition to the boycott: 'I thought it was racist, and a blanket indictment of all Japanese people.' At that time he was completely unaware of the dolphin slaughter. It would be another 10 or 15 years before environmental groups began to take an interest in what was happening in the town.

When O'Barry returned to Taiji in 2003 and first witnessed the slaughter for himself, he says he was sickened. 'When you see the photographs and the videos, it's not the same as seeing it in real time. You don't hear the screaming or smell the death. When I saw that, I couldn't believe it. One moment you're looking at the most peaceful, tranquil cove in the world. Off the shore you see the dolphins going by, complete and perfect after 65 million years of evolution. And in a few hours those same creatures are reduced to small chunks of meat on a concrete floor. Heads lying there. All these images I would take back to the hotel with me, and now I'm supposed to go to sleep. The reality is I haven't slept well since. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it.'

He began to return to Taiji on a regular basis, sometimes for two or three months at a time, video­taping as much as he could of the hunt, and circulating the film to media and environmental groups. 'I'd stand on the road beside the cove at 5am, trying to film the slaughter, surrounded by guys who wanted to kill me but weren't sure how to do that without drawing attention to themselves. It was frightening, to be perfectly frank with you.'

It was largely thanks to his efforts that the dolphin slaughter began to attract the attention of environmentalists – and the fishermen of Taiji intensifed their efforts to conduct the slaughter in secret. The hunt has been disrupted by the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd, and by a group of 30 Surfers for Dolphins, who in 2007 conducted a peaceful 'paddle-out' in the cove. But The Cove promises to bring unparalleled attention to Taiji. 'There's a Japanese word, gaiatsu, that means "external pressure",' O'Barry says. 'That's what this campaigning is all about. The Cove is gaiatsu-plus. And it's really going to piss them off.'

During the hunt, the view into the cove is usually blocked by tarpaulin screens. But there was no sign of them as our bus pulled up in the small layby opposite. Nor, looking out to sea, was there any sign of the dolphin-hunting fleet. It was hard to tell whether this was because the sea was too rough, whether there were no dolphins, or whether the fishermen, in a mood of expediency, had decided temporarily to suspend operations.

O'Barry had evidently been expected. Two cars filled with plainclothes police pulled in behind us, shortly followed by a van containing a Japanese TV crew. A policeman began to note down passport numbers while three more questioned O'Barry.

'Have you come to make trouble?' one asked.

'I have come to show the world that Taiji is a beautiful place,' O'Barry said.

'Do you know any anti-whaling groups who come here?'

'No, I don't.'

The policeman looked bemused. He bowed and led his colleagues back to their cars.

O'Barry stared at the slate-grey, empty sea. 'One day with no dolphins killed,' he said, with a ringing note of satisfaction.

Ric O'Barry first encountered dolphins as a child growing up during the Second World War in South Beach, Miami, where his father was a restaurateur. 'You could see the dolphins out there in the surf, and I remember my mother telling me a story of how dolphins had saved the lives of airmen who had parachuted out of their aircraft, by pushing them to shore. That stuck with me. I've never heard of another animal saving the life of a human. That's altruism.'

At the age of 16 O'Barry joined the US Navy; on his first leave from boot camp, on Christmas Day 1955, he went with his family to the opening day of the Miami Seaquarium. 'I remember walking up to the main tank and I looked through the window and it was absolutely surreal: there were 12ft sawfish, stingrays, giant sea turtles, dolphins, and there was a guy walking around the bottom with a canvas suit and a helmet on, handing out fish to all these creatures. I said to myself, when I get out of the navy I'm going to come back and get that guy's job. And I did.'

In the navy, O'Barry had trained as a diver, and his first job for the Seaquarium was capturing dolphins for display – he estimates that in his first year he captured more than 100 – before being promoted to the 'top deck show', putting the performing dolphins through their paces. 'It was the greatest job in the world. I had the key to the back gate at the Miami Seaquarium. At 6pm everybody goes home, and this 12 acres was mine! I got a new Porsche. I was dating Hollywood starlets on my day off. It was as if I'd won the lottery.'

In 1963 he landed the job of training the dolphins used in Flipper. He moved into the house beside the saltwater lake where the series was filmed, and where Kathy, the dolphin that primarily played Flipper, lived. (The four other Flippers were mostly kept at the Seaquarium.) He would remain there for the four years the series lasted.

The dolphin's smile, O'Barry says, is one of nature's great deceptions. They do not jump through hoops and balance beach balls on their nose because they enjoy it. The trigger to the dolphin's tricks, or 'behaviours' in the favoured euphemism, is food deprivation. 'Nowadays they call it "positive reward", but that's just spin. From the dolphin's perspective it is purely a matter of: if I do this correctly, whatever it is, this idiot is going to blow the whistle and I'll get a fish.'

At that point, O'Barry had what he describes as a 'utilitarian relationship' with his dolphins. 'I was attached to them, of course, but it was all about what they could do for me. Then it gradually became clear that they didn't belong in captivity. At 7.30 on Friday night I would go down to the dock with the TV on an extension lead, and Kathy and I would watch Flipper together. And I realised that they are self-aware. Did I feel guilty? Yes. I struggled with that for years but I didn't do anything about it. It's very easy when you're a young guy and you have your blinkers on.'

For O'Barry, the blinkers were never quite tight enough. He developed an interest in the work of a close neighbour, the neurophysiologist John Lilly, who was doing the most radical research into dolphin intelligence and communication. Lilly devised experiments that demonstrated that two dolphins kept in separate tanks could communicate with each other over underwater 'telephones' wired between the tanks. Lilly eventually concluded it was morally wrong to keep dolphins in captivity and released all his animals.

O'Barry began to conduct his own experiments, using music played through underwater speakers as a form of communication. The dolphins particularly enjoyed Ravi ShankarRavi Shankar and Strauss waltzes, he says. But he now regards the matter of communicating with dolphins as 'frivolous. I don't have to talk to them, I know what they would say: leave us alone.'

For O'Barry, this realisation finally struck in 1970, when he received a call to tell him that Kathy, his most beloved dolphin, was ailing in her tank at the Seaquarium. He rushed there in time for her to die in his arms. 'It was suicide,' he says. 'I know that's a strong word, but that's what I saw her do. She just stopped breathing of her own volition. She died of a broken heart and boredom.'

O'Barry vowed to himself to free every captive dolphin that he could. A few days later, wearing his Seaquarium T-shirt, he flew to Bimini in the Bahamas, where a dolphin named Charlie Brown, which O'Barry had captured himself, was being kept in a sea pen at the Lerner Marine Laboratory. Under cover of darkness, he removed a section of the pen using wire-cutters, but was unable to steer Charlie Brown to freedom. The next morning O'Barry handed himself in. He spent a week in jail. A Miami newspaper reported the story as 'Trainer of Flipper in flap'.

With donations from a number of friends, including the rock musician Stephen Stills, O'Barry founded the Dolphin Project, to study dolphin behaviour and to free and rehabilitate animals from dolphin shows and 'research' institutes. He estimates that he has helped to free some 30 dolphins from captivity, many covertly. 'All I was doing was putting them back on the right side of the fence.'

One can detect in all of this a sense of atonement on O'Barry's part. The business of performing dolphins that Flipper – and O'Barry himself – gave birth to is now worth billions of dollars. According to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, there are some 250 dolphinaria around the world holding more than 1,000 dolphins. O'Barry says that in the right setting a single dolphin can generate $1 million a year. Japan has the largest number of dolphinaria – 47 – of any country. (In the 1970s there were more than 30 dolphinaria in Britain, but the last three captive dolphins were released back into the wild in the Caribbean in 1991 after the government imposed strict minimum standards of care following a public campaign.) Studies have shown that dolphins in captivity suffer from illness, behavioural abnormalities and premature death. 'None of this is educational, as the industry claims,' O'Barry says. 'It's the opposite – it's bad education.'

Taiji is the principal supplier of dolphins for facilities in China and Japan, the sales usually brokered by the town's Whale Museum. (The Riviera Dolphin Blue Resort, which opened in Kamakura-Zushi in July, for example, has four dolphins from Taiji, kept in a marina polluted by diesel fuel from luxury yachts. Visitors are charged 6,300 yen – about £42 – to 'hug a dolphin'.) In Taiji, the meat from a dolphin fetches up to 50,000 yen (£330), but a good live specimen can be worth £100,000. O'Barry maintains that it is this lucrative market, rather than issues of tradition or food, that drives the hunt. 'If they weren't capturing them for sale, they wouldn't be slaughtering them. It's as simple as that. They talk about cultural issues, but it's purely business.'

The manager of the Whale Museum, Hiromitsu Nambu, says that the sale of live dolphins 'provides much-needed finance for education and research'. He has denied that the museum is associated in any way with the slaughter, and says it does not 'receive funds, encourage or participate in any killing of dolphins for meat'. O'Barry says that his experience in Taiji has taught him that attempting to persuade the Japanese to abandon dolphin hunting on the grounds of cruelty is futile. What he describes as the dolphin hunting lobby's Achilles' heel is mercury poisoning.

Mercury enters rivers and oceans primarily through rain and surface water run-off. Bacteria can then convert it to an organic form, methyl­mercury, which biomagnifies up the food chain – which is why 'top-level' predators such as sharks and dolphins often have the highest mercury levels. In humans, mercury can cause severe foetal damage resulting in problems with mental development, and can also cause harm in adults, ranging from memory loss to circulatory failure.

When O'Barry first came to Taiji he bought dolphin meat that was being sold in supermarkets and had it tested for mercury. The levels far exceeded Japanese safety standards. O'Barry distributed the information, but nobody paid much attention. Then, in 2006, two Taiji city assemblymen, Juni­chiro Yamashita and Hisato Ryono, carried out their own tests on pilot whale and dolphin meat purchased locally, similarly sourced to the meat being served to children in school lunches.

One dolphin sample had a mercury content 10 times the health ministry's advisory level and a methylmercury reading of 10.33 times the advisory level. Another dolphin sample tested 15.97 and 12 times the advisory levels of total mercury and methylmercury respectively. These levels are higher than in some of the mercury-tainted seafood tested during the Minamata pollution disaster of the 1950s, which led to the death and disfigurement of thousands of people, according Dr Shigeo Ekino of Kumamoto Medical Science University in Kyushu, an authority on the Minamata poisoning.

O'Barry told me that following the tests, dolphin meat was quietly dropped from the school lunch menu. But the Japanese government has made no attempt to ban its sale in shops and restaurants.

Both Yamashita and Ryono are interviewed in The Cove talking about the levels of mercury in dolphin meat – an act of considerable courage in a society where, as the saying has it, 'the nail that sticks out is hammered down.' Ryono, who is
still an assemblyman, has since criticised the film, telling a Japanese news agency, 'It's a betrayal… I thought [the film] was about marine pollution, but it's about anti-whaling.' Yamashita now drives a taxi in Tokyo. 'He was put under tremendous pressure,' O'Barry says. 'No one would talk to him. He's the real hero in this story. In a righteous world he should be the mayor of Taiji or the minister for the environment.

'My question is, if they won't serve dolphin meat to children how can they keep on selling it? But the Japanese media just won't report on this. Every Japanese person knows about Minamata, so we just have to connect the dots between Minamata and Taiji. The fact that the dolphins are toxic could be the one thing that saves them.' He paused. 'Which is ironic, when you think about it.'

Early in the morning on our second day in Taiji, O'Barry walked through the lobby of the hotel, wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words dolphin rescue team, and carrying a laminated folder showing pictures of toxic dolphin meat, and a book on Minamata, ready for his encounter with the Japanese TV crews outside.

He proposed a tour of Taiji. We set off in the coach, a small convoy on our tail. At the harbour the flotilla of boats used for the dolphin drive bobbed serenely in the grey waters. Evidently there would be no hunt today. Outside the Fisherman's Co-operative building was a barricade and a sign announcing keep out excepted persons related. no photography. At the supermarket opposite, a man whom O'Barry identified as the head of the Fisherman's Co-operative stood guard at the door, apparently determined to repel anybody entering in search of the incriminating evidence of dolphin meat. There was a stand-off. The shutters of the supermarket came down.

We retreated to the bus and set off for the Whale Museum, what was rapidly becoming a circus in our train. In the museum packages of whale meat – or dolphin – stood on the shelves in the gift shop, beside the cuddly whale toys. 'This is the only place in the world where you can watch dolphins perform and then go and eat them,' O'Barry said drily.

Glass doors led out to the dolphinarium – a large lagoon, with a dyke blocking egress to the sea beyond, and divided into a series of holding pens, containing perhaps a dozen dolphins and pilot whales. 'I hate these places,' O'Barry said. 'I know exactly what these dolphins are experiencing. I absorb their suffering.'

In a separate pen a single magnificent orca whale – one of only two solitary orcas in captivity – was going round and round in circles. Tinkly muzak came over the public address system, and a man in a blue plastic suit walked along a gangplank, holding a bucket of fish. At his command the orca rose out of the water, then fell backwards with a resounding splash. The man held up a pole with a ball attached to its end. As the music rose in a faux-majestic crescendo, the orca circled the pen, gathering the momentum to leap into the air and touch the ball with its snout. It was hard to conceive of a more depressing example of man's misguided dominion over beast. O'Barry passed by without a glance, the Japanese television crew in his wake.

Next to the lagoon were outbuildings housing a number of smaller tanks. In one, of little more than 24 square metres, two bottlenose dolphins pressed their snouts against the glass. O'Barry looked sick. 'This is a torture chamber,' he said. 'It would not be allowed anywhere else in the world.'

Two trainers in blue suits had now taken their place on the gangplank leading into the lagoon and were coaxing three dolphins and a pilot whale into squirting them with water before swimming away, flapping their fins in the air in a parody of farewell. O'Barry was brandishing his photos of toxic dolphin meat at the TV cameras, saying, 'I'm not the story, this is the story.' Marooned in its separate pen, the orca lolled against the struts of the gangplank, forgotten, an actor resting before the next performance.

That evening, the events of the day made the third item on the news (the first was the theft from a car of a bobble-head doll), presented as a group of 'foreign activists' descending on Taiji, disrupting the lives of the fishermen. There was a fleeting mention of the mercury issue. It was day two, and the drive had still not begun. 'Today,' O'Barry said, 'was a good day for dolphins.'

Dolphins are not on the list of endangered species although, according to Mark Palmer of Earth Island Institute, the number presently being slaughtered off the shores of Japan is sufficient to 'degrade or even exterminate' the population specific to that region. As cetaceans, dolphins might be expected to fall within the purview of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which in 1986 imposed a moratorium on all whaling other than for 'scientific purposes'. But Japan has systematically blocked any attempts to have dolphins placed on the schedule, arguing that the IWC does not have 'competency', as it is called, for small cetaceans.

While there is no internationally imposed restriction on the number of dolphins that can be killed in Japanese waters, the government's fisheries agency imposes its own quota of 23,000 a year. About 16,000 were killed last year. 'The number is going down,' Palmer says, 'partly, we think, because they are depleting the stocks and partly because they are finding it harder to sell the meat.'

Polls indicate that only one per cent of the population eat whale meat, and it seldom features in the diet of young Japanese. The Japanese whaling industry is now almost wholly subsidised by the government. 'I think the Japanese government is very concerned that if whaling is stopped by environmentalists, then other fishing opportunities they have around the world could also be stopped for environmental reasons,' Palmer says. 'They really see this as, if whaling goes down then they'll come after us...