Six am Sunday morning, March 21, the One Voice Dolphin
Rescue team received a phone call from Billy Adam who is spearheading the
“Keep Dolphins Free in the Cayman Islands” campaign. The help of One Voice
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.
Captive dolphin facilities in Honduras and Jamaica were
already standing by with airplanes and staff members, geared up to go to
Grand Cayman and take over the dolphin rescue attempt. It was important
for the dolphin freedom campaigners on island not to involve the dolphin
captivity industry, for the simple reason that several dolphinariums are
in the planning stages in the Cayman Islands, despite strong local
opposition to dolphin captivity: The entrepreneurs behind the proposed
dolphinariums would no doubt use the rescue effort to further propagate
the position that a captive dolphin facility is needed in the Cayman
Islands in order to deal with any future dolphin standings.
The One Voice team traveled to Grand Cayman immediately,
arriving on-site within a few hours after the call for assistance came in.
The many locals, who have been fighting the proposed captive dolphin
facilities for years, were thankful that One Voice was able to show up
with such short notice but, sadly, the dolphin died. He was only a few
months old. When dolphins are this young their markings and coloring are
not fully developed, and it is therefore sometimes difficult to determine
their species. However, we suspect he was a spotted dolphin (Stenella
plagiodon). Somehow he got separated from his mother and the rest of his
pod, but we will never know exactly what brought him ashore.
For several hours, area residents, volunteers, and
environmentalists took 30-minute shifts standing in the water, shading the
dolphin with beach umbrellas and helping him keep his balance in the
water. Billy Adam, Juliet Austin, and local veterinarians Dr. Brenda Bush
and Dr. Elizabeth Broussard were among the team of caregivers who did
everything possible to save the young dolphin. But at 3:30 pm the dolphin
took his last breath.
Several people, including grownups, started crying when
they realized 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 recently returned from Taiji, Japan, where whalers intentionally drive
hundreds of dolphins ashore and kill them in the most gruesome way
imaginable. One day we witnessed the capture of more than 100 bottlenose
dolphins, and we were shocked to see whalers and dolphin trainers working
side by side to beach the panic-stricken animals. The trainers spent
several hours selecting the ones they wanted for their dolphinariums.
Dragging the dolphins ashore with ropes, they separated the mothers from
their babies with extreme brutality. The dolphins’ cries of distress were
met with complete indifference.
“We love dolphins.” This is the dolphin captivity
industry’s first line of defense when confronted with the questionable
ethics of capturing and confining dolphins. Their second line of defense
is: “We are displaying dolphins to teach the public respect for nature.”
But there was no sign of “love” or "respect” for dolphins on this day
where dolphin trainers mercilessly stranded an entire pod of full-grown
dolphins, juveniles, babies, as well as pregnant and nursing females and
dragged more than 20 of them away from their pod members to be shipped to
various dolphinariums. Dolphin trainers simply stood by and watched as
some of the dolphins, in a massive effort to escape, got entangled in the
whalers’ capture nets and, unable to reach the surface to breathe, died a
slow and painful death of suffocation. We witnessed how members of the
dolphin captivity industry, in their self-serving endeavor to choose the
dolphins that best fit the desired criteria for dolphin shows and captive
dolphin swim programs, knowingly and calculatingly exposed dolphins to
trauma, injuries, and death. This is the dark side of dolphin captivity
that the public is never told about. On South Point in Grand Cayman,
however, we saw a very different picture. Here, 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 and other pod members. Among the rescuers
was Gina Ebanks-Petrie, head of the Department of Environment. 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 the ability to move freely. With this in mind, they named the
dolphin “Freedom.”
Thanks to the effort to rescue "Freedom,” the issue of
whether or not dolphins belong in captivity once again became an issue of
high interest to the media in the Cayman Islands; something it hadn’t been
in a long time.
To our knowledge, there are four proposals to bring
captive dolphins to the Cayman Islands. If the authorities approve the
import of captive dolphins, the Cayman Islands will become part of the
dolphin trade that nourishes its profits from deadly dolphin captures; a
procedure that leaves dolphin pods traumatized 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 in South Sound
the day “Freedom” died. Compassion and care will be replaced with
crudeness and greed. A passionate 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. Freedom died but in his death brought new life to the effort 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 www.onevoice-ear.org
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