Ric O'Barry
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Richard (Ric) O'Barry was first recognized in the 1960’s for capturing and training the five dolphins that were used in the well-known TV series Flipper. The show led to an increased interest in trained sea mammals and O’Barry profited from this popularity. However, soon after one of the Flipper dolphins died in O’Barry’s arms he made a radical transition from training dolphins in captivity to actively releasing every dolphin that he could.
Biography
O’Barry currently lives in Coconut Grove, Florida and has been fighting against the captivity industry for the past 38 years. In 1989 O’Barry founded the non-profit organization, Dolphin Project Inc., to study Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins in estuarine waters. Since 1989 the organization has successfully documented and surveyed over 850 different individual bottlenose dolphins. In addition, O'Barry has written several books to raise awareness about dolphins in captivity including Behind the Dolphin Smile (1989) and To Free a Dolphin (2000).
Flipper
O'Barry began training dolphins in the 1960's with the Miami Seaquarium. It was while working with the Miami Seaquarium that O'Barry was highered to work on the television series Flipper. Though O'Barry admits that he readily noticed the remarkable intelligence of the mammals he was working with, he also attests to ignoring this factor when weighing it against the large profit he was making from the show. In his own words,"I was young, I had a glamorous job, I was driving a Porsche and it was easy to do."
When one of the five Flipper(s), a bottlenose dolphin named Kathy, died O'Barry could no longer deny the severity and potentially fatal consequences of the captivity industry he had helped to establish. O'Barry maintains that Kathy died from a form of suicide. He supports this claim with the widely acknowledged fact that all cetaceans are voluntary air-breathers and all dolphins are of the order Cetacea. Unlike humans, and many other land-dwelling mammals, a dolphin has the ability to choose when it takes a breathe, or consequently when it does not. According to O'Barry, after weeks of showing signs of depression Kathy swam into his arms, opened her blowhole to take a breathe and then never took another.
Directly following Kathy's death O'Barry released his first dolphin from a sea pen holding off the island of Bimini. Then in 1970, on the first Earth Day, he founded the original Dolphin Project with the primary goal of releasing dolphins from captivity.
Current Work
Most recently, O’Barry has become a member of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) and worked on the feature length documentary The Cove, directed by Louis Psihoyos. The 2009 film centers on Taiji, Japan, bringing attention to the twenty-three thousands dolphins that are killed there every year. The Cove utilizes equipment and tactics never previously used by filmmakers in order to obtain footage that the Japanese government refused to allow the film crew to capture.