Hosted By: Save Japan Dolphins and Oceanic Defense

www.savejapandolphins.org

www.oceanicdefense.org

We know that Miami Seaquarium is pursuing a 3-5 million dollar claim against BP to upgrade/update their filtration system as water may become contaminated from the Gulf spill. Miami Seaquarium and its owners Andrew and Arthur Hertz have no plans for the wellbeing of Lolita or their other marine life, including 30 dolphins, about 15 seals/sea lions, dozens of reptiles, fish, sea turtles, and at least eight manatees. They are merely interested in protecting their profits. These animals will be in grave danger if they are not moved or protected immediately. It is time to tell United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) & Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to enforce the laws and regulations of the Animal Welfare Act.

Please cut and paste the following letter, sign your name and send to the email addresses shown below. Feel free to edit, personalize & share any way you see fit. Thank you for your support! Special thanks to John Kielty for writing this entry.

Send to:
USDA-APHIS-Animal Care: ace@aphis.usda.gov
USDA-APHIS-Animal Care East: aceast@aphis.usda.gov
USDA-APHIS-Policy & Programs: aphis.web@aphis.usda.gov
Abbey Shaffer- Legislative Teams Leader: abbey.l.shaffer@aphis.usda.gov
Christopher Needham- Legislative Affairs Specialist: christopher.needham@aphis.usda.gov
James Ivy- USDA-APHIS: james.c.ivy@aphis.usda.gov
Bethany Jones- Deputy Administrator of Legislative and Public Affairs: bethany.x.jones@aphis.usda.gov
Edward Avalos- Under Secretary for Marketing & Regulatory Programs: ed.avalos@usda.gov
Kathleen Merrigan- Deputy Secretary of Agriculture: kathleen.merrigan@usda.gov
Tom Vilsak- Secretary of Agriculture: agsec@usda.gov

Comma separated if you’d prefer a single bulk mailing:
ace@aphis.usda.gov,aceast@aphis.usda.gov,aphis.web@aphis.usda.gov,abbey.l.shaffer@aphis.usda.gov,christopher.needham@aphis.usda.gov,bethany.x.jones@aphis.usda.gov,ed.avalos@usda.gov,kathleen.merrigan@usda.gov,agsec@usda.gov,james.c.ivy@aphis.usda.gov

Also, please cut and paste this letter into the contact forms of these Senators:
Senator Maria Cantwell: http://cantwell.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Patty Murray: http://murray.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=ContactMe
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida: http://billnelson.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm

RE: Miami Seaquarium disaster contingency plan & safety for orca Lolita

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
Animal Care (AC)

To whom this may concern:

As you may be aware, Andrew Hertz, General Manager of Miami Seaquarium, a small aquarium in Miami, Florida, has recently stated his intention to file a $3 to $5 million dollar claim against BP citing his requirement to upgrade the marine park’s filtration system should the waters of Biscayne Bay become contaminated from oil resulting from the Deep Water Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico (www.justnews.com/news/23910898/detail.html). By this action, the Hertz family has admittedly demonstrated that they are not prepared, equipped or otherwise capable of carrying out a disaster contingency plan to provide emergency sources of water and/or arrangements for relocating marine mammals as is required by APHIS Regulation 9 CFR section 3.101(b). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts an 80% chance that the oil will hit the Miami area in August and I am deeply concerned the Miami Seaquarium wildlife is in jeopardy. In addition to Killer Whale Lolita the lives of 30 dolphins, about 15 seals and sea lions, dozens of reptiles/fish, sea turtles, and at least eight manatees are in peril. Your immediate action is required to ensure their safety.

Should the Hertz family be successful in securing funds for this major reconstruction effort, it is my contention that Miami Seaquarium be required by USDA-APHIS to bring ALL provisions of animal welfare, including marine mammal housing size, into compliance with current APHIS Regulations under the Animal Welfare Act.

Since the brutal capture of killer whale (orca) Lolita in 1970, she has been kept in a tank that is illegal by current APHIS standards for space requirements as provided in Regulation 9 CFR section 3.104. Now 43 years old, Lolita is approximately 21 feet long and 7,000 pounds. Her tank is 20 feet deep at the deepest point, a mere 12 feet deep around the edges and 35 feet wide. Lolita’s life of misery in these substandard confines has continued long enough. The Hertz family has been profiting from Lolita’s exploitation for more than 40 years and the time has come to end her suffering and provide her the protection and quality of life she deserves. They should not be allowed to continue operating with no emergency contingency plans, under outdated regulations, and making piecemeal improvements aimed solely at protecting profits. Now is the time to act on Lolita’s behalf. Time is running out!

As a part of Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at the USDA, I know that you are concerned with the future of marine mammals in captivity and the urgent crisis developing at the Miami Seaquarium. Please do your part and ensure immediate action is taken and provisions are provided that require Miami Seaquarium’s compliance with all current APHIS Regulations under the Animal Welfare Act for this emergency and any future construction and/or upgrades at their marine mammal park. If the Hertz family finds that complying with all current APHIS Regulations is not cost feasible, alternative viable solutions are under development to provide a safe retirement for Lolita in her native habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Details of this proposal can be found here: www.orcanetwork.org/captivity/2007proposaldraft.html. There are many wonderful people and knowledgeable organizations willing to work with the Miami Seaquarium and are ready and waiting to move forward with a rehabilitation/retirement plan for Lolita and the other animals, including dolphins, that may be in danger currently at Seaquarium.

Sincerely,
(Your name)

Taima was known for misbehaving and was sometimes aggressive to the other orcas. She was born at Sea World Orlando in 1989 to Gudrun (died 1996), a female orca captured from Iceland. Taima was about 18 feet long and over 6,500 pounds when she died. She is survived by three calves — Sumar, Tekoa, and Malia. Her youngest, Malia, is only 3 years old. Wild orcas remain with their mothers for life, so we’re hoping for the best for this little one.

Taima died at age 20. Keep in mind that many wild female orcas live well into their 60’s – and some live even longer than that! Please boycott marine parks, such as Sea World, Miami Seaquarium, Six Flags, etc. if you disagree with the practice of keeping large, intelligent marine mammals in captivity for human amusement.

Katina, a 35 year old killer whale at Sea World Orlando, is expected to give birth shortly to another of Tilikum’s calves.
Only time will tell what will happen to her.

Please consider buying or renting this fantastic documentary (available on iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon.com) to see for yourself the cruelty surrounding the hunt of 23,000 dolphins per year and the marine park captivity industry.

Copy and paste the URL’s into your URL bar to link:
iTunes: http://is.gd/5g2Ie
Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Cove/70112741
Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/yzmufuf

“Academy Award® Award-winner for Best Documentary of 2009, THE COVE follows an elite team of activists, filmmakers and freedivers as they embark on a covert mission to penetrate a remote and hidden cove in Taiji, Japan, shining a light on a dark and deadly secret. Utilizing state-of-the-art techniques, including hidden microphones and cameras in fake rocks, the team uncovers how this small seaside village serves as a horrifying microcosm of massive ecological crimes happening worldwide. The result is a provocative mix of investigative journalism, eco-adventure and arresting imagery, adding up to an unforgettable story that has inspired audiences worldwide to action. THE COVE is directed by Louie Psihoyos and produced by Paula DuPré Pesmen and Fisher Stevens.”
^ Text from www.TheCoveMovie.com

If you liked THE COVE, you may also be interested in:
- Lolita: Slave to Entertainment (dolphin/orca captivity): http://tinyurl.com/yj8ww9u
- A Fall from Freedom (dolphin captivity): http://tinyurl.com/y9q9uss
- The End of the Line (about the fishing industry): http://tinyurl.com/yc6pamn
- Fowl Play (about the egg industry): http://tinyurl.com/yjlpfd5

*Please copy and paste the URL links below into your URL bar to link*

“Dear Ms. Mizuho Fukushima:

Scientific studies have demonstrated that dolphin and whale meat is highly toxic and not fit for human consumption, due to contamination from methylmercury, mercury, PCBs, and other poisons. Please prevent any further damage to the health of the Japanese people by banning the sale of dolphin and whale meat immediately.

Sincerely,

Your name and contact information.”

Please send your letter to:
Minister of the Consumer Affairs Agency
Ms. Mizuho Fukushima
Sanno Park Tower
2-11-1 Nagatacho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Japan 100-6178
Fax: +81-3-3500-4640
Keiko Ueda, legislative Aide to Ms. Mizuho Fukushima, Member of the House of Councillors, Social Democratic Party
E-mail:ukgo@jca.apc.org

I will be volunteering by handing out flyers in front of the Aventura mall theater on Friday August 7th, other volunteers are needed in South Florida and around the country.  If you can donate some of your time contact me at shelby@savelolita.com.  Thank You.

For all showings go to www.thecovemovie.com

Ric O’Barry trained TV’s most famous dolphin. In a new film, he atones for that sin

The idea that “each man kills the thing he loves” has been interpreted by many—from Oscar Wilde to Paulo Coelho—but it’s always had a particular resonance in the environmental movement, where every hiking trail and ecofriendly resort inevitably destroys or alters nature in the name of love. For 69-year-old activist Ric O’Barry, the paradox is an apt expression for his cause: the preservation of dolphins.

“Everybody loves them, right?” he asks. “But be careful with the word love.”

To O’Barry, even activities as seemingly benign as paying to see dolphins perform at SeaWorld or swimming with them in captivity constitutes abuse. “We love dolphins like they’re our family—I hear that a lot. Really? You lock your family up in a room and force them to do tricks before they eat their dinner?” O’Barry says. “The dolphin is a sonic creature; its primary sense is sound. You put one in a bare concrete box with music blaring and people shouting, of course it’s stressful! If people could see them in the wild, they’d never buy a ticket to a dolphin show.”

O’Barry is sitting in a midtown bar, his scuffed sailor shoes and messy shock of white hair, bleached by years of sun and saltwater, endearingly out of joint with the city. He’s in town to promote The Cove (opening July 31), a white-knuckle chronicle of his attempts to expose the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, where 2,000 a year are killed, legally, in a hidden lagoon. Funded by Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, the documentary plays like a behind-enemy-lines thriller. Largely shot in jittery handheld and frantic night vision, the at-times gruesome footage—dolphins spasming in death while impaled on spears, blood spurting until the entire cove turns red—can be hard to watch, which is the point. O’Barry wants to shock viewers into activism, doing for dolphins what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. Like Gore’s, O’Barry’s cause is deeply personal. Only he feels he is to blame.

Christmas, 1955. A teenage Richard Barry O’Feldman (he would later change his name) was released by the Navy for a fourteen-day leave. To celebrate, he took his mother and brothers to the newfangled Miami Seaquarium. “It was only the third dolphinariumin the world, and it was the best one,” he says. “Dolphins everywhere. I saw a guy in the tank, with all these creatures, and I said, ‘When I get out of the Navy, I’m coming back to get that job!’ Five years later, I did.”

O’Barry spent the sixties in the water, training dolphins and the Seaquarium’s famous killer whale. In 1964, SeaWorldopened in San Diego and welcomed over 400,000 visitors in its first year. Soon, O’Barry was training five dolphins—Susie, Patty, Kathy, Scotty, and Squirt—for a new TV show based in Florida.

For a generation of kids, Flipperprovided a popular answer to the question What do you want to be when you grow up? Marine biologist! The hit show, which aired from 1964 to 1967, took place in an idyllic marine preserve and posited Flipper as a smarter RinTin Tin—and a proxy parent to the show’s two motherless children. In episodes like “Flipper and the Fugitive,” the dolphin saved lives, apprehended criminals, and performed the famous tail-walking trick choreographed by O’Barry. “That dock in the show, where the kids would meet Flipper? I lived in that house that whole time,” says O’Barry, who thrived in the sunny, hippie heyday of Coconut Grove, with neighbors like Tennessee Williams and David Crosby. O’Barry was good friends with Woodstock co-founder Michael Lang, who says he has a snapshot of “Ric riding a killer whale playing a wooden flute.” Another pal, Joni Mitchell, sang to the dolphins.

Then, in 1970, just as all sorts of idyllic promises were wilting (Kent State, Manson, Vietnam troops returning home), O’Barry had a life-altering experience. After a spiritual trip to India, he visited Kathy, who by then was “retired” and living alone in a tank in Florida. She was noticeably anxious (something he now calls “captive-dolphin depression syndrome”). On the day that changed everything, she swam into his arms and ceased breathing, sinking to the bottom of the tank. O’Barry emphasizes that, unlike humans, dolphins are not “automatic breathers”; they can choose to stop. He’s convinced Kathy did just that, in essence committing suicide.

Two days later, O’Barry was jailed for trying to free another dolphin. After his release, he stopped training dolphins and began fighting full time. For the next 30-odd years, with little organizational support, he would battle the dolphin- entertainment industry he had helped launch, springing dolphins from captivity and fighting the Navy’s use of them for mine detection (all chronicled in his 1988 memoir, Behind the Dolphin Smile). O’Barry says he’d be running his own “politically correct dolphin sanctuary and making two or three million dollars a year” if it hadn’t been for Kathy. Instead, he’s singularly focused on places like Taiji, where fishermen—after capturing and selling the cuter females—slaughter thousands of dolphins to sell as food.

O’Barry protesting in Tokyo in 2007.   (Photo: Brooke Aitken/Courtesy of Dolphin Project Archives)

More than 20,000 dolphins are killed in Japan annually, and it’s big business in Taiji, where O’Barry has become a public enemy, regularly surveilled by the local police. “In Japan, they call our strategy gaiatsu,” he says. “It translates to ‘external pressure.’ ” For O’Barry, the film will be successful if it can inspire a movement as effectiveas “Save the Whales” back in the seventies and eighties. If he can stop the slaughter in Taiji (a situation perpetuated by the government, but largely unknown to most Japanese), he can move to other dolphin-slaughtering areas, like the Faroe Islands. But he’s also coming around to good old-fashioned star power. After years of struggling for media attention, O’Barry scored worldwide coverage when actress Hayden Panettiere joined a group of surfers protesting the slaughter in Taiji. “Here’s a 19-year-old TV starlet who’s able to get more attention in fifteen minutes than I’ve been able to do in sixteen years,” he says. “So now I’m going back with Sting and Ben Stiller.”

Inevitably, of course, the goal of The Cove is also to make a celebrity of O’Barry. His son is developing a Hollywood biopic, and O’Barry just returned from Washington, where, thanks to The Cove’s festival-circuit success (it won an Audience Award at Sundance), he was able to meet with the staffs of California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, handing out links to his website, SaveJapanDolphins.org. “We’re encouraging thousands of people to write to President Obama,” says O’Barry. “The times they are a-changing again. I’m sure of it!”

http://nymag.com/movies/profiles/57863/index1.html

Please visit the link above, and comment on the story.  Also send a letter to the editor thanking them for running this very important story.

ALSO…check out this link to see when and where you can see “The Cove” in your city!  It opens July 31st in select cities and then most others on August 2nd!

http://thecovemovie.com/festivals/upcoming_screenings.htm

This movie will change the way you think about captive dolphin facilities and the way the world views dolphins.

This is  a great article on Ric O’Barry, former dolphin trainer at Miami Seaquarium turned activist.  This article will show you have captive marine mammal facilities foster brutal dolphin drive fisheries across the globe.  O’Barry speaks of many issues including the brutality of the captures, the captive industries involvement, and the mercury contamination of the dolphin meat itself.  Make sure to check out his documentary “The Cove” when it comes out on July 31st of this year.  Ric is truly a hero in the animal activism field, I have never met someone with so much passion and dedication to these beautiful marine mammals.  We need more Ric O’Barry’s in the world today.

Lolita's teeth are chipping

 
 Now only 3 pacific white sided dolphins are in the tank with her I asked someone where the other one went and they didn’t answer clearly.  I do have them on tape saying that 6 lags will be kept in Lolita’s tank with her within the next year if everything goes according to plan.  I will upload some parts of the show along with this little interview with an employee later and link to them on youtube.
 
 Another disturbing thing that I encountered is that the bottlenose dolphins in the Top Deck dolphin tank all seem to have some sort of disease on the underneath base of their flukes, and one has a strange lump where it looks like an incision has occurred.  All in all it was highly disturbing.

dolphin fluke infection

for more photos visit www.myspace.com/saveouroceansnow and click the album “operation shut down seaquarium” under pics.

Four Pacific white-sided dolphins now in the tank with Lolita, and two more could be on the way to join the crowd. The tank is only 35 feet by 80 feet by 20 feet deep, with a medical pool behind the platform that is only 12 feet deep.

Here’s the first person report (the source shall remain anonymous to allow re-entry):

I went to the SQ today to hand out flyers and check on Lolita.  They are now keeping her with 4 Pacific white-sided dolphins, the 2 that are normally there along with 2 that they are “borrowing” for breeding purposes.  I couldn’t get the attendant to tell me where the  other 2 are from, but Lolita now has NO access to the medical pool because she doesn’t get along with the 2 new dolphins.  I also learned that another white-sided dolphin that is usually kept with her is removed because she is pregnant, but once she gives birth and is cleared she and the baby will also be held with Lolita, along with the other babies if they are conceived.   That means their is a potential of having 6 dolphins in her tank with her within the next year.  She seemed very somber today though she came up to me again.  I swear she knows what we are trying to do for her.  The attendant also told me that Hugo (the young male orca captured in Puget Sound in 1968 who died in 1980) died of a brain tumor (cancer) and didn’t commit suicide, I found that amusing because according the the MMIR (Marine Mammal Inventory Report), the cause of death is clearly stated as a “aneurysm cerebral artery.” He also let us know that no hurricane preparation is taken by the SQ, so all the animals stay exactly where they are now in the event of a hurricane.  I know we knew that but hearing it form an employee is sad.

White-sided dolphins tend to travel in groups of a hundred or more, and range for hundreds of miles in their natural habitats. Crowding four, or six, dolphins together in that tiny tank with Lolita is unethical and irresponsible for the dolphins and for Lolita. In the 1970’s Hugo bashed his head against the wall of the tank several times. He broke the viewing window twice, once nearly slicing off the tip of his rostrum, which was stitched back in place.

PLEASE CONTACT APHIS AND THE USDA telling them about this blatant display of cruelty.  Lolita’s tank is illegally sized when she is in it by herself and now she must share it with 4 dolphins without having access to her medical pool.