Toronto – Dolphins? Check. Japanese fishermen? Check. Sushi? Check. Drum rolls… and cue Hemingway:
He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. It jumped again and again in the acrobatics of its fear… what an excellent fish dolphin is to eat cooked, and what a miserable fish raw. I will never go in a boat again without salt or limes…
… And cut. I made the unfortunate decision to have sushi on Cumberland just before stepping into the theater for The Cove, which may have made me a bit of a pseudo-hypocrite… but I don’t kill dolphins. This isn’t a movie about over-fishing, although it is an acknowledged problem. It also isn’t about cruelty to animals, of which there are plenty in the movie and many would argue that I’m stupid for denying it. This is a documentary about how an anthropocentric view can lull people into beliefs and value systems from which they cannot detach without admitting that they were being ridiculous. Officially, The Cove is a brain-child of the Oceanic Preservation Society, an organization dedicated to photographing and documenting the degradation of our oceans. It highlights the crusade of Ric O’Barry, the trainer responsible for Flipper and many other trained dolphins. Dolphins, with their botox-fixed smiles, are an easy sell (try for example sharks which is also the constant victim of Chinese cooking, or cod/tuna which people do not empathize with because all they ever see is a fillet without big-watery eyes). For Ric and many others (among them surfers who were saved from tiger sharks), there’s nothing to sell. They’re saving a species proven to be particularly intelligent. But try as they might, fishermen, and particularly these ones in Japan, do not see that intelligence. Every September to March, the fishermen at Taiji round up dolphins by confusing them using a sonic barrage and select bottlenose or whichever they find aethetically pleasing for aquarium training.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, they kill the rest of the dolphins, babies included. At the cove where the killings take place, fishermen spear the dolphins, just like the Old Man had done in Hemingway’s classic. And it stains the entire cove, about 50 meters out to the sea, just like in the book. And if these guys have their figures right (23,000 a season), there would be 100+ daily, just like how we hunted sperm whales to near extinction. What do they do with the carcasses afterwards? They sell the meat to consumers. And what’s wrong with that? Like sharks, dolphins are top predators. And the way the oceans are polluted these days, like sharks, their bodies are filled with chemicals and heavy metals, mercury being one of the worst. And if we are the ultimate top predator who eats everything else, guess what happens to us? We get numb and dumb from mercury poisoning. Nice. This movie isn’t the first or last to show cruelty, and for visual brutality doesn’t always compare to vids on youtube (try vermin/gopher hunting…), but the imagery lasts. A dolphin tumbling on its last breath of red streams isn’t going to sit well with a lot of people. Neither will divers bopping happily in bright red seas. But it’s baffling why this practice persists. If I were to put this in terms of the human equivalent: do we kill the rest of an elementary class after we select the brightest/best-looking students? Do we smother the reminder of a litter after we pick the show dogs/cats? And the worst is, according to Hemingway and the mercury levels, dolphin isn’t even that good for sushi… It’s absurd!
I leave the animal-rights activists to their 2-cents, but like many before, it’s a documentary that’s sure to reheat some old arguments. It’s a good one though, worthy if nothing as a thriller. Watching photographers and divers face-off against angry, jock-ish fishermen a foot shorter is hilarious. The mocking laughs from the fishermen is sure to boil some green/environmental blood. The thermal camera added well to the tension. And the entire film was set like an Oceans 11 (no pun intended) atmosphere. It has its sensationalist moments, the sounds being some of the more powerful elements. You could literally see the tears in O’Barry’s eyes when he heard the clicks. The cinematography isn’t Planet Earth shattering, but it’s nicely done. And it did win audience award at Sundance. But I think as an awareness piece, its showing targets the wrong audience. If anything they should show (and they probably had) it to consumers, or at aquariums. Think twice next time when you see the smiles on dolphins.
