Psihoyos, who had never made a movie before, is known as one of the world’s top photographers, with 18 years of experience at National Geographic. The American director is also a diver and ardent conservationist—he founded the Oceanic Preservation Society with Jim Clark in 2005. Psihoyos stumbled across the Taiji dolphin story at a conference in 2000. O’Barry was listed as a keynote speaker, but his appearance was cancelled after SeaWorld, one of the sponsors, objected. His curiosity piqued, Psihoyos looked up O’Barry, who then invited him to check out Taiji.
The film portrays this Japanese backwater as a kind of Twilight Zone town with a happy face and a dark secret. It’s a tourist attraction with a whale museum and an aquarium that has performing dolphins. Cartoon-like images of them adorn signs around town, and there are even sightseeing boats shaped like dolphins. “If you didn’t know what was going on,” says Psihoyos, “you’d think it’s a town that loves dolphins and whales.” The killing cove is well-hidden, but dolphin meat is served at the aquarium—you can actually eat Flipper while watching dolphins perform tricks.
Some 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are killed in Japan every year, according to O’Barry, and Taiji is the world’s largest dolphin slaughterhouse. Ironically, what drives the carnage is the live captivity industry—the worldwide demand for fresh talent to perform in dolphinariums or swim-with-dolphin programs. Live dolphins can fetch up to US$150,000 each, while butchered ones are worth only about $600. The film shows Taiji’s fishermen driving herds of the animals toward the shore by suspending metal poles from their boats into the sea and banging on them to create a terrifying wall of sound—dolphins have super-sophisticated sonar. Once the animals are driven into pens by the shore, desirable young female bottlenose dolphins are separated for live capture, while the rest are reserved for slaughter.
Although dolphin aquariums often have an eco-friendly face, O’Barry insists that even the more humane ones are cruel. “The dolphin’s got a larger brain than the manager of the Vancouver Aquarium,” he says. “And yet its habitat is a concrete box. Is that stressful for an animal that is free-ranging and normally travels 40 miles a day? Of course it is—that’s why the mortality rate is so high in dolphin amusement parks.” O’Barry says it’s impossible to get accurate data because the industry hides the numbers. “The veterinarians fill out the reports, and having been around the industry for 50 years, I’ve never met one marine mammal vet who was loyal to the patient; they’re all loyal to the client.”
However, the issue that the filmmakers are counting on to rescue dolpins from both fishing and capture is not animal welfare. It’s mercury poisoning. Like all large sea creatures near the top of the food chain, dolphins contain high levels of mercury, which is the most toxic non-radioactive element on the planet. In high concentrations it can impair vision and hearing, destroy neurons, and produce effects similar to mental retardation. The Cove’s crew included DNA scientist Scott Baker, a marine mammal expert, who tested samples of “whale meat” in Tokyo markets that was supposed to be from the less contaminated southern oceans. In fact, some of it was dolphin meat containing 20 times Japan’s acceptable level of mercury. The crew’s tests prompted Taiji’s city commissioners to conduct their own tests on dolphin meat in the school lunch programs, and as a result it was removed from the lunches in the area.
Dining on whale and dolphin is not unusual in Japan, and is defended as part of the country’s cultural and nutritional heritage. In fact, the website for Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare recommends a diet for pregnant women that includes regular portions of sperm whale, porpoise—and even bottlenose dolphin, which can have anywhere from five to 5,000 times Japan’s legal mercury level. But Psihoyos says there is “a systematic cover-up of mercury and dolphin hunting issues in Japan” that’s linked to government corruption and the yakuza— Japan’s mafia. “We don’t blame the Japanese people,” he says, because they are unaware of what’s going on. “Japanese people who have seen the film are shocked and embarrassed.”
The Cove has been sold to distributors in some 40 countries, but so far Japan is not one of them. Psihoyos says the government is preventing the movie from being released there, “but it’s more important for it to be shown in Japan than anywhere.” Given the Internet, it will find a way in. And if the movie goes to the Oscars—which seems inevitable—Japan will be unable to ignore it.
As his awards pile up, Psyihoos says, “The biggest reward is if we can stop this horror show. We’re not trying to make a movie; we’re trying to start a movement.” Yet it’s not the message, or its harrowing footage of Taija’s bloodbath, that will draw audiences to The Cove. It’s the film’s value as real-life espionage thriller. Like Michael Moore’s documentaries, or An Inconvenient Truth, this is a movie that makes saving the world an entertaining prospect. So more than four decades after Richard O’Barry helped build an industry to drive dolphins from the wild with Flipper, they could be rescued from slaughter by catching another Hollywood wave.
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