The man who helps dolphins

The Toronto Star -- Ontario
NEWS Tuesday, June 19, 2001 A11

Flipper's trainer now works to get animals released
Linda Diebel
LATIN AMERICA BUREAU
MEXICO CITY

The man who saves dolphins says it's about karma. He's trying to make things right again.

For most of the 1960s, ex-U.S. Navy diver Ric O'Barry trained five animals for the U.S. television hit Flipper, about a dolphin who helps humans. The series was filmed at O'Barry's Florida home, with Flipper swimming up to the end of his dock on the show.

Suddenly, everybody wanted dolphins, from burgeoning big-city aquariums and marinelands to people who, for a few hundred bucks in those unregulated times, stuck one in their backyard pool.

'Flipper was probably the worst and the best thing that happened to dolphins,' O'Barry says during a stopover in Mexico City.

The animal activist was travelling from the site of an ongoing dolphin crisis in Mexico to one unfolding this week in Guatemala.

'It helped create the capture industry and sea worlds everywhere. I helped do that. Now, instead of capturing them, I am helping untrain them and put them back where they belong.

'It feels better. I want to tear down what I once built up.'

O'Barry, 61, had an epiphany when his favourite TV 'Flipper,' called Cathy, died in his arms. He now works as a wildlife consultant for the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), reporting to its Boston office.

He fell in love with dolphins as a boy on Miami Beach. He loves the myths and legends, and wears a gold signet ring showing a dolphin saving a drowning man.

'They say even Elian Gonzalez was saved by a dolphin,' says O'Barry. In 1999, the little castaway was rescued in the Florida Straits after his mother's escape from Cuba ended tragically. In a controversial move, the U.S. government later returned him to his father in Cuba.

To this day, many in Miami's Cuban community believe Elian's miracle began with a wondrous dolphin who carried the boy on her back.

O'Barry's work is full of euphoria and heartbreak.

Here in Mexico, he doesn't know what the outcome will be.

He spent last week in the Baja peninsula, where seven survivors of a brutal capture and transport from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of California are being held in a crummy ocean pen near La Paz. The FINS 'dolphin learning centre' is training these bottlenecks for a 'swim-with-the-dolphins' program.

One female, Luna, has died. The others, including Quinta, who was dropped eight times during transport, are, according to dolphin experts, overheating in shallow water.

'It was really hard to see them,' O'Barry says of last week's vigil at the dolphin pen.

'We watched them spend 80 per cent of their time (with their heads) above water just looking out to sea. Usually dolphins spend most of their time underwater. It was poignant, sad to see.

'That place really looked like death to me.'

The La Paz dolphins are at the centre of an international protest, which has included Star readers and a legal fight by Mexican environmental authorities to secure their release.

Today is the next legal deadline in the battle to determine their fate.

O'Barry, working with Mexican environmentalist Yolanda Alaniz and the WSPA, is ready with a rescue plan if the animals are seized by officials.

Last week, they drove to Magdalena Bay on the Pacific, where the dolphins were captured in December.

'Their (Magdalena Bay) home is a very wild place with cold water. It would be so easy to take them back there. Everything is ready to go,' says O'Barry.

'We hope they can be freed. It would be a tremendously positive message to the world about Mexico's respect for nature if we can take these animals home to the sea.'

O'Barry savours his victories.

There was no finer moment, he says, than watching another dolphin named Flipper the last held in captivity in Brazil swim free, moving in a straight line for the first time after a decade in captivity.

'I can't even describe it. That is the payoff. Really amazing,' says O'Barry, of that rescue effort in the mid-1990s.

He adds this Brazilian Flipper was filmed 22 months later thriving in the wild, which belies the argument that dolphins can't be rehabilitated.

In Guatemala, too, a happy ending appears near.

O'Barry flew to the Central American country Saturday to continue rescue efforts for two dolphins pregnant Ariel and male Turbo who were abandoned in a mountain town by Mundo Marino (Marine World), a Venezuelan travelling marine circus.

According to WSPA officials, this particular operation arrives in a town, hires someone to bulldoze a pit, lines it with plastic, fills it with tap water and adds table salt and chlorine. Then, the dolphins are dumped in to perform.

After townsfolk complained, the owners disappeared in the middle of the night.

'We got to Ariel and Turbo just in time,' says O'Barry, of a rescue effort that began earlier this month.

'Another day or two, and they certainly would have died. Their water was absolutely putrid, they hadn't eaten for days and they both had sores all over their bodies.'

With Guatemalan government support, O'Barry is supervising an airlift expected this week to take the animals to a Pacific Ocean pen for a brief rehabilitation. It's near where they were captured 14 months ago.

'These dolphins deserve to be free,' says O'Barry. 'They are very complex, sophisticated creatures and, in the wild, freedom drives their every decision.'