Hosted By: Save Japan Dolphins and Oceanic Defense

www.savejapandolphins.org

www.oceanicdefense.org

Tillikum, captured at age 2, from Iceland in 1983, has a rough past though and even before this incident, trainers were not allowed in the water with him. He is the largest orca in captivity. In 1991, he was accused of drowning his trainer, 20 year old Keltie Byrne, at Sealand of the Pacific (now closed). Then, in 1999, the body of a young man was found floating in Tillikum’s tank one morning.

It is unknown what Tillikum’s fate will be but according to Sea World press conferences, within a few days, the shows will resume as usual. However, even as of July 2010, trainers are still not allowed in the water with the killer whales, even during training sessions and performances.

HERE ARE THREE THINGS YOU CAN DO:
1. You may send a comment to Sea World, regarding the attack and the possibility of retiring Tillikum at the link here: https://secure.peta.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2945

2. You may also wish to take 2 minutes and comment on this new article about Sea World, Seaquarium, and Lolita:
http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local-beat/What-About-Lolita-85394102.html

3. Please vote in this poll (the second option) to say that Orcas belong in the wild, not at Sea World:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-poll-killer-whale-seaworld-022510,0,6354939.poll

Thank you for your time and check back for updates.

This Saturday, February 27th, we are having a peaceful PROTEST for Lolita’s retirement from noon to 2 PM outside of the Miami Seaquarium. Banners and leaflets will be provided. Please come to show your support for retiring captive orcas around the world!

“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

Killer whale at park since 1970 capture

By Susannah Bryan
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

August 8 2009, 7:57 PM EDT

KEY BISCAYNE – It’s a long way from Puget Sound.

But that is where Lolita the killer whale belongs, say more than 30 animal activists who protested Saturday at the Miami Seaquarium.

Instead, she spends her days in a concrete tank flipping for crowds at the popular marine park.

“Every week one of us goes in to check on her,” said Shelby Proie, 24, a Nova Southeastern University student who helped organize the protest. “I go to the tank and tell her we’re trying to get her out.”

Lolita, the park’s 7,000-pound star attraction, has been here since her capture in 1970.

“She’s not going anywhere,” said Michelle Palomino, a spokeswoman for the park.

Lolita, hand-fed daily for the past 39 years, could not survive on her own in the ocean, Seaquarium General Manager Andrew Hertz said in a written statement.

“Lolita is very special and dear to us and she will continue to be an ambassador for her species from her home at Miami Seaquarium,” Hertz said.

Leading the protest Saturday was Ric O’Barry, the Coconut Grove dolphin trainer turned activist who stars in The Cove, a documentary released Friday about the slaughtering of dolphins in Japan.

O’Barry doesn’t believe Lolita should be released into the wild, but rather transferred to a natural sea pen in Puget Sound where she might reunite with her marine family.

“It’s about retiring Lolita and letting her live out the rest of her life in quiet and dignity,” said O’Barry, a former Seaquarium trainer who has campaigned against using dolphins in marine parks. “But they’re going to milk every dollar out of her before she dies.”

Lolita typically performs two shows a day. Park managers estimate her age at 42 to 45 years.

Activists claim she spends most of the time resting lifelessly on the bottom of the tank, bored.

“After the show, the orca just goes and sits in the corner,” said Simon Hutchins, of Fort Lauderdale, who appears in The Cove as expedition director for the Oceanic Preservation Society. “It’s a nightmare for this orca.”

Lolita, who is 21 feet long, lives in a tank 20 feet deep at the deepest point.

Park officials say her tank meets industry standards. Critics counter it’s too small.

Parkgoer Julian Royal, of West Palm Beach, doesn’t buy the notion that dolphins and orcas like Lolita are miserable in captivity.

“They seem to be [happy],” Royal said before entering the park with daughter Sarah, 11.

His reaction did not surprise O’Barry, who figures Royal had not seen his film. If so, he may have thought twice about coming, he said.

“People believe orcas should live in concrete tanks and do stupid dolphin tricks. The Cove is going to change that.”
Copyright © 2009, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/sfl-lolita-miami-seaquarium-080809,0,6232966.story
Visit South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com at http://www.sun-sentinel.com

Please be sure to comment on the article an send a “Thank You” letter to the editor for covering this cause. The more intersted we are in this issue to the more the paper will continue to follow our efforts to retire Lolita.

For more pictures of the walk you can visit www.myspace.com/saveouroceansnow and click “pics” then “walk for Lolita”

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

By: Keith Berger

“There is about as much educational benefit to be gained in studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary confinement” – Jacques Cousteau

You may have remember a recent story here about an ongoing injustice in South Florida:
“The Miami Seaquarium keeps a prisoner in a watery cell twenty-three hours a day, bringing her out twice daily to perform for customers in the name of education and entertainment. She is an orca – an intelligent, sensitive marine mammal – and her name is Lolita. The crime for which she was ripped from her family and has been imprisoned for nearly 40 years, longer than Nelson Mandela’s infamous stay on Robben Island: profitability.”

Sadly, there’s more.
Lolita is not alone in her plight. According to the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida (ARFF), “Florida is… still the biggest player in the marine park industry, with 13 attractions and 367 captive sea animals, more than any other state”.
(For more details about how to help end Lolita’s inhumane and illegal captivity, please visit www.savelolita.com and see the information at the end of this article)

Chlorinated Cruelty
Some facts about aquatic mammals held captive in marine parks:

• Tanks are kept clean with harmful chemicals rarely encountered in natural marine habitats. Because of high chlorine levels in their tanks, dolphins at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida were unable to open their eyes, and their skin began to peel off.
• In the wild, orcas and dolphins swim up to 100 miles per day, but captured dolphins are confined to tanks that may be only 24 feet long, 24 feet wide, and 6 feet deep. They navigate by echolocation—bouncing sonar waves off other objects—but in tanks, the reverberations from their own sonar bounce off the walls, driving some dolphins insane
• The natural activity levels, sociality, hunting behaviors, acoustic perceptions, and indeed the very texture of small cetaceans’ (any of an order of aquatic marine mammals including whales, dolphins and porpoises) natural environments are severely compromised in captivity.
• Capture techniques cause intense stress, can be harmful and even fatal. Orcas and dolphins are harassed, terrorized, and chased until caught. Unwanted dolphins are thrown back. Some die from shock or stress; others succumb to pneumonia when water enters their lungs through their blowholes. Pregnant females may spontaneously abort babies. Some drown. Those who survive endure a life of captivity, never seeing their close-knit families again.
• The risk of dying increases six-fold in bottlenose dolphins during the first five days after a capture, and a similar mortality spike is seen after every transport between facilities. Every transport is as traumatic to a dolphin as a capture from the wild.
• Of at least 193 orcas held in captivity since 1961, 151 (78%) are now dead. The overall mortality rate of captive orcas is at least 2 ½ times higher than that of wild orcas. Their size and complex physical and social requirements cause them to suffer serious negative consequences when confined in tanks. Twenty-two orcas have died at SeaWorld parks since 1985: four young calves, others in their teens and twenties.

Less than 20 orcas are known to have survived more than 20 years in captivity; only two have survived in captivity for more than 35 years.  One of these is Lolita.

The Liability of Intelligence
A recent 76-page report by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) entitled The Case Against Marine Mammals in Captivity: The Fourth Revised Edition states, “One of the primary foundations for the moral and ethical arguments against keeping cetaceans in captivity is that they are intelligent. Ironically, it is their intelligence that has made these animals desirable for public display—their ability to understand human commands and learn complex behaviors or tricks has been exploited to provide humans with entertainment”. Studies involving dolphins indicate that they are at least as intelligent as great apes and human toddlers, demonstrating self-awareness and abstract thinking capabilities. The report puts this in perspective:

“…it can be argued that bottlenose dolphins have a level of understanding comparable to that of a two-year-old child, although the linguistic skills of cetaceans hint at intelligence far more developed. Locking two or three young children in a small room 24 hours a day—even one with a window and a dog for a companion during the day—would be considered child abuse. Yet confining dolphins in an equivalent space for their lifetime—with a human caretaker to interact with during business hours—is standard practice for dolphinaria and aquaria”.

While many marine parks claim to provide “educational programs”, the goals of for-profit facilities are to provide entertainment and make money. ARFF explains, “…justifications for marine parks as places of education and conservation have never stood up against examination. Traditional exhibits center on animals performing tricks that are exaggerated variations of their natural behaviors. These tricks prevent the audience from contemplating the barren concrete enclosures… Jacques Cousteau believed that captive dolphins are conditioned and deformed and bear little resemblance to dolphins living in freedom in the sea. It’s like studying human psychology only in prisons, which leads, obviously, to misinterpretations and absurd generalizations”.

Sadly, rather than learning about and gaining respect for the rich lives of these complex and fascinating animals, children come away from marine parks with an understanding that these beings are ours to dominate and exploit, as we do with countless other species of non-human animals.

The HSUS/WSPA report suggests, “The tide may be turning for captive marine mammals” as a result of growing public opinion against these facilities. In the United States, 13 dolphin exhibits have closed in the last fifteen years, while only four new exhibits have opened. In Florida, there was one closure and two openings.

ARFF reports, “As news gets out about traumatic captures, barren concrete tanks, high mortality rates, and aberrant – even dangerous – animal behavior, people are beginning to realize that hidden behind the dolphin’s “smile” is an industry built on suffering… people are becoming concerned about marine mammal suffering and uncomfortable at sea circuses. Citizens are now speaking out loudly that dolphins and whales belong in the ocean”.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) suggests, “Don’t visit parks or zoos that have captive marine mammals unless you are doing so to monitor the animals as part of a campaign. Encourage your local aquarium to stop breeding animals in order to make space for rehabilitating (and releasing) injured wildlife. Report poor conditions to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leaflet at the park, write letters to the editors of local publications, and pressure officials to avoid subsidizing these facilities with taxpayer money. Support legislation that prohibits the capture or restricts the display of marine mammals”.

Today, Lolita continues to languish in her tiny tank, but you can help her find freedom.  On Saturday August 8, 2009 from 12 noon until 2pm, there will be a Walk for Lolita.

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.

A vegan shirt salesman, Marc Bennett, contacted me about a week ago asking to sell the Lolita shirts on his site. He gives 5$ of every purchase to a charity of our choice – I picked Orca Network, since they’re helping us so much with the Lolita campaign. I drew the design on my computer because he said he can only print designs of one color. But it’s still really neat!

http://www.giveashirtproject.com/product.sc?categoryId=2&productId=8

Help Lolita retire by getting a shirt and raising awareness along with donating a portion of the proceeds to OrcaNetwork.org who is the greatest supporter of The Lolita Retirement Project.

C’mon shirts are only $15!!!

A great friend, who often comes to demos wrote this piece on Lolita:

Lolita: Miami’s performing prisoner for 39 years and counting

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. – Mahatma Gandhi

A Sad Situation

The Miami Seaquarium has kept a prisoner in a watery cell for nearly 40 years, longer than Nelson Mandela’s infamous stay on Robben Island.  Her name is Lolita.

Her crime: profitability.

In 1970, a team of individuals using planes, speedboats and explosives terrorized and captured the Southern Resident orca community in Puget Sound for display in marine parks.  Ripped from her family and her natural environment, Lolita, originally named Tokitae, was taken to Miami, FL where she continues to languish nearly four decades later as an entertainment slave.  This beautiful orca, forced to perfom one to two shows daily, spends the other twenty-three hours each day in a cramped, rusty tank that is illegal according to the Animal Welfare Act and Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) standards for size requirements.  Lolita is approximately 22 feet long and 6,000 pounds. Her tank is 20 feet deep at the deepest point and 35 feet across.  It is, in essence, little more than a bathtub.  Lolita is allowed only one toy, as she has a history of swallowing them out of boredom.  She has also been known to chew the cement off the corners of her tank, most likely in a display of the stereotypical behavior exhibited by animals and mammals held captive in psychologically stressful conditions.

According to savelolita.com, a website designed to raise awareness about Lolita’s plight and to work for her release, “The Miami Seaquarium is often considered to be one of the most dilapidated marine parks in the world.  It is in need of substantial repairs, and per the Marine Mammal Inventory Report, has a substantial death rate for their marine mammals.” Shelby Proie, an activist who has worked tirelessly to win Lolita’s freedom by organizing demonstrations (see below), interviewing on CNN and petitioning various animal welfare organizations, states, “They are also trying to breed the pacific white sided dolphins [with whom Lolita shares her tiny enclosure] so within a year they will have 6 (if all the births happen).  It seems they are trying to phase Lolita out so they don’t have an empty tank.”

On their website, the Orca Network clearly states its goals for their Lolita Come Home Project:

“The primary goal of the Lolita Come Home Project is to move Lolita from her present location at Miami Seaquarium to a rehabilitation/retirement facility in an ocean water seapen in Washington State, where she can retire from show business while still receiving the care of humans for her health and safety.

A secondary goal is to reacclimatize Lolita to her native habitat with open water “walks”, so she can return to a healthy physical condition and metabolic strength, similar to that of her free-ranging family members.

A third goal of this project is to facilitate Lolita’s reintroduction to her family pod members. This will be done acoustically first, visually second, and socially last. It will be up to Lolita to decide whether she wishes to remain in the social company of her family or return to human care.

Lolita’s story has been featured in Newsweek, on CNN , in newspapers and in a one-hour documentary film entitled Lolita: Slave to Entertainment

How YOU Can Help

Ms. Proie, in conjunction with the Orca Network, holds demonstrations outside the Miami Seaquarium at 4400 Rickenbacker Causeway, Key Biscayne, FL 33149 the last Saturday of each month.

There will be a demonstration this Saturday, May 30, from 12 noon until 2pm.  Details  and contact information can be found at the Animal Rights Meetup Group, and there is no limit to the number of people who can attend.