From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2000:

To Free A Dolphin
2000. 269 pages, hardcover. $23.95.

Behind The Dolphin Smile
1988, 2000. 300 pages, paperback. $15.95.

Both by Ric O'Barry with Keith Coulbourn
Renaissance Books (5858 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200, Los Angeles, CA 90036)

As this is written, dolphin freedom advocate Ric O'Barry is
working by telephone and Internet--with no budget and no media notice--to
prevent the start of swim-with-dolphin programs at Anguilla and Tortolla,
in the British Virgin Islands. O'Barry and the people who tipped him off
about the swim-with programs believe that the dolphins to be used were
previously kept at Diver Land in Margarita, Venezuela, where a dolphin
named Cheryl who was of special importance to O'Barry died on October 31,
1997.
Originally captured and trained by the Russian Navy, Cheryl was
sold circa 1991 to Waterland Mundo Marino, a traveling show based in Cali,
Colombia. Argentinian animal advocate Martha Gutierrez showed Cheryl to
O'Barry in 1995. Finding Cheryl in declining condition, O'Barry promised
he would save her. Gutierrez and O'Barry won an order from a Buenos Aires
court that Cheryl should be surrendered to their custody for rehabilitation
and release, but Waterland Mundo Marino instead spirited her out of
Argentina. O'Barry and allies tracked Cheryl as best they could for the
next two years, but caught up with her at Diver Land just a few days too
late.
Also at this writing, O'Barry has joined Free Willy! producers
Richard and Lauren Donner in helping Hawaiian activists including Steve
Sipman to fight plans by the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation to
build a $20 million theme park around a new site for the Dolphin Institute
at Maui Nui.
The Dolphin Institute, headed by University of Hawaii researcher
Louis Herman, emerged in 1993 out of studies of captive dolphins begun in
1975 at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory. Then-assistants Sipman
and Ken Lavasseur in 1976 became concerned that two Atlantic bottlenosed
dolphins kept there were unduly suffering, and released them. Sipman and
Lavasseur then called the police, identified themselves as the "Animal
Liberation Front," and awaited their arrest, in the first U.S. "ALF"
action on record --and still the only one by people who made no effort to
hide.
The action itself was not quite a first. O'Barry had already tried
to free a captive dolphin from the Lerner Marine Laboratory in Bimini, the
Bahamas, on Earth Day 1970. But the dolphin refused to leave through the
hole O'Barry cut in the fence separating the lab tank from the sea.
O'Barry walked to the police station, turned himself in, spent a week in
jail, and eventually paid a fine of $5.00.
Others protested dolphin captures even before that. O'Barry in his
newly reissued first book, Behind The Dolphin Smile, recalls how as a
member of the Miami Seaquarium capture team he evaded protesters in 1962 to
net the albino dolphin Carolina Snowball. She survived three years in
captivity.
Under Miami Seaquarium trainer Ricou Browning, O'Barry meanwhile
became chief handler of the five dolphins who performed in the film and TV
series Flipper. When the TV series ended, O'Barry was retained to look
after the dolphins for one more year. Then he was cut loose.
Deeply disturbed, but uncertain why, O'Barry became a
semi-recluse for a while; became a vegetarian; traveled to India to seek
his soul; returned to the U.S. to participate in marine mammal
intelligence research; and was called one day to try to save the life of
one of the Flipper dolphins, Kathy, who died in his arms from conditions
O'Barry diagnosed as consequences of stress and neglect.
From that moment O'Barry has dedicated his life to liberating
dolphins. Opening with the Bimini fiasco, Behind The Dolphin Smile
entertainingly and informatively recounts how O'Barry came to be the
dolphins' Don Quixote.
Until the unexpectedly successful first edition of Behind The
Dolphin Smile made O'Barry famous in 1988, he worked mostly alone, in
obscurity and near poverty. Yet O'Barry did manage to return several
dolphins to the sea.
Success brought emulation--and eclipse, especially after 1993,
when the film Free Willy! and two sequels made cetacean freedom temporarily
the most trendy and lucrative branch of animal protection. Latecomers who
rarely had even a fraction of O'Barry's experience and commitment soon
surpassed O'Barry in winning TV exposure, raising funds, and forming
strategic alliances with major animal advocacy groups.
O'Barry, to many, seemed to be no more than a possibly envious
voice from the shadows when he warned that the orca Keiko, who played
Willy, was a poor candidate for release. O'Barry told ANIMAL PEOPLE that
Keiko was far too habituated to people and essentially content in captivity
to succeed in the wild--but O'Barry also named many other captive whales
and dolphins whom he believed should be set free. They included two of the
last dolphins captured from the wild in U.S. waters, who were kept at a
Florida facility called the Ocean Reef Club, and a number of Navy-trained
dolphins who were soon to be sold as surplus. O'Barry believed the Navy
dolphins might be especially promising release candidates because they had
never been totally removed from the ocean.
Despite O'Barry's caution, David Phillips of Earth Island
Institute and Free Willy! producers Richard and Lauren Donner created the
Free Willy/Keiko Foundation, now called Ocean Futures, and raised $14
million to prepare Keiko for possible release.
Four years after taking custody of Keiko, and one year after
flying him to a sea pen in his home waters along the coast of Iceland,
Ocean Futures--with most of the money gone--acknowledged in October 2000
through spokesperson Hallur Hallsson that "It is likely that Keiko will
remain in captivity until the end of his life."
Taught to catch live fish and given repeated chances to go free,
Keiko simply didn't.

Went on about his work

O'Barry meanwhile went on about finding dolphins he could free
successfully, and releasing those whose custody he won through whatever
tactics each situation seemed to call for. His repetoire included a
prolonged hunger strike in Israel and many arrests for nonviolent civil
disobedience.
O'Barry's own chance for Free Willy!-level recognition seemed to
come in 1994, when almost simultaneously the U.S. Navy agreed to make up
to six "surplus" dolphins available for release, and Ocean Reef Club
handed their dolphins to activist Joe Roberts--whose involvement began when
he heard O'Barry speak to a diving club.
To Free A Dolphin centers on the formation and dissolution of the
Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary. The site was a Florida Keys resort owned by
attorney Lloyd Good, with a resident performing dolphin trained by Good's
son Lloyd Good III, and a history of conflicts with environmental
regulation. O'Barry and Roberts hoped to use the site to rehabilitate and
release the ex-Navy and Ocean Reef Club dolphins.
From the beginning there were conflicts. O'Barry believes that
Lloyd Good III all along really wanted to breed and keep dolphins, not
release them. He had a female, and O'Barry and Roberts brought more
females plus males.
Roberts also made a tactical mistake, O'Barry argues, in bringing
into the project former Ocean Reef Club trainers Ric Trout, Lynne
Stringer, and Mary Lycan. O'Barry believes that all three had a
fundamental conflict of interest, in that as trainers they need to have
dolphins to make a living-- and even if their motives were uncompromised,
O'Barry explains, their whole approach is based on interaction.
O'Barry, alone among the leading figures in cetacean liberation,
uses the standard techniques of wildlife rehab for release. He minimizes
interaction, instead allowing animals to discover for themselves how to do
what they need to do to survive. Help is limited to making sure the
animals get enough to eat, are treated for illness or injury, and are
constantly challenged with opportunities to learn key skills--preferably
without being aware of either human involvement or observation.
O'Barry believes all of the dolphins who were meant for release
could have been freed within 60 to 90 days of their arrival at Sugarloaf,
if he had been able to do things his way. His record elsewhere suggests he
was right. But exascerbating the internal problems at Sugarloaf were a
parade of visiting donors and celebrities who couldn't resist making pets
of the dolphins who were supposed to be released.
Add to that what O'Barry and ANIMAL PEOPLE believe was deliberate
disruption by undercover agents provocateur. ANIMAL PEOPLE eventually
identified four individuals in proximity to Sugarloaf with histories of
alleged espio-nage against activism. Too late to help either O'Barry or
the dolphins, ANIMAL PEOPLE uncovered a trail of hints that self-appointed
Sugarloaf "peacemaker" Rick Spill was actually attorney Bill Wewer. Wewer
had direct links to Norwegian whalers and Canadian sealers, but dropped
out of sight in 1991; Spill, of hazy background but strong resemblance to
Wewer, emerged as a marine mammal activist in mid-1993.
Keeping U.S. activists focused on release projects and infighting
helped Norway to resume commercial whaling (1993) and Canada to resume
offshore sealing (1995).
Whalers and sealers also had, and still have, a more subtle
reason to covertly involve themselves in opposition to marine mammal
captivity. As harmful as captivity tends to be to individual animals taken
from the wild, the growth of the anti-whaling and anti-sealing movements
can be traced directly back to the popularity of Flipper and the attraction
of millions of people to view marine mammals at oceanariums. Captive orca
facilities could even be credited with building the empathy with orcas that
brought the success of Free Willy! and sequels, and the effort to make the
happy ending come true.
The same phenomenon is evident in Japan, where an anti-whaling and
anti-dolphin slaughter movement has grown in recent years following the
opening of popular marine mammal exhibition sites. Some of the sites are
reportedly sponsored by fishing companies which sell whale and dolphin
meat--but the messages they try to push apparently have less influence than
the experience of direct contact with the animals.
Thus O'Barry, ironically, may have done more for dolphins in his
Flipper capacity than in his subsequent role as dolphin advocate. One
could also make a case that the gradual disappearance of substandard
dolphin facilities around the U.S. and Europe results from the requirements
of keeping dolphins alive and economic competition from the five-site Sea
World empire, not from O'Barry's appeal to conscience.
O'Barry's reputation took a beating from the much publicized
"failure" of the Sugarloaf project: Ric Trout et al left in a huff,
accusing O'Barry of fakery. Joe Roberts left in a huff, taking the Ocean
Reef Club dolphins to a sea pen on the Indian River, near their capture
point. Someone cut the fence and released those dolphins before they could
be freeze-branded for identification, so no one really knows if they
survived or not. It seems likely, however, that they did.
Anticipating federal seizure of the ex-Navy dolphins as result of
complaints by Trout and others, O'Barry and Good III released two of those
dolphins near Sugarloaf. O'Barry argues that the release would have
succeeded if Trout had not lured them back with a Navy "recall pinger."
Others claim both dolphins were injured and starving when recaptured. Two
others of their group were returned to Navy duty; the two other dolphins
who had been at Sugarloaf are at the Dolphin Research Center, a near-by
swim-with facility. O'Barry and Good III were heavily fined for having
released the two dolphins without a permit.
Even leveling all fair criticisms at O'Barry, his books are an
absorbing and inspiring two-part self-portrait of a marine Man of La
Mancha. His commitment is enduring, his successes have reduced the
universe of suffering, his failures have not increased suffering, and he
has undeniably broadened human awareness and compassion.
--M.C.