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4. THE INTERNATIONAL DOLPHIN DEALERS

4.2   A Labyrinth of Mirrors

In the unlikely guise of a West Sussex fireman, former whale and dolphin trainer Doug Cartlidge has in recent years become the UK dolphin industry's most formidable and outspoken critic. His career began 20 years ago at Scarborough Marineland and Flamingo Park Zoo in Yorkshire. He went on to become head trainer at Windsor Safari Park in 1971 and Curator of Sea World Australia in 1974. It was here that his already gnawing doubts over the treatment of captive cetaceans at last came to a head and in 1976 he lead a strike in protest against conditions. But it was a harrowing experience during a dolphin catch for Sea World Australia off the Great Barrier Reef that eventually prompted Cartlidge to quit the business for good. "We caught three dolphins in our net and were bringing them in slowly," he recounts. "The first old one was too big for a show dolphin. The next one was scarred where sharks had had a go at it and was too big anyway, so they both went over the side. The next one was a beautiful six-footer and as clean as a whistle. 'We'll have this one', we decided, and we started to pack up. Then I saw the two dolphins we had put over the net just sitting about 30ft away, looking at us. I don't know what it was but I just felt guilty. And then suddenly it hit me. I realised what we had was their two-year-old baby. All the way back to the main boat they followed us. I was near to tears. It was the way they were looking at me. They weren't sitting up in the water, they were just lying on their sides and watching with one eye out of the water." More than any other single factor, says Cartlidge, it was this experience which caused him to turn against the industry, and take his case to the public. "It is no crusade," he insists. "I can only publicise what is wrong in the industry until the public sees it's wrong. When that happens, at least two childless dolphins out in the Pacific Ocean will finally have made their point."

Ardent proponents of the industry like Professor Paul Schauenberger, a researcher at the Museum of Geneva, scorn such criticism as being anthropomorphic and emotionally-biased. "There are about 600 dolphins living in captivity today, which is only a negligible number" compared to wild populations, he maintains. Furthermore, he asserts, most dolphins originate from shallow coastal waters in the Gulf of Mexico where the depth of the sea rarely exceeds four or five metres, making the animals "naturally suited for adjustment to life in the aquarium." Conveniently, nothing is said of the spatial needs of the dolphin in other dimensions, nor of the comparative quality of the two environments. The reader may also notice that it is the dolphin that must adjust to the aquarium and not the other way round. This kind of thinking is typical of the industry and the particular brand of science which supports it. In the anthropocentric scheme of things, the individual is habitually subjugated to the species and because of this, animal rights are, by implication, either severely curtailed or non-existent. It might be more logical to assume that the wild population cannot be assured unless its individual members are also afforded some measure of protection. It is not so much a matter of numbers but of human attitudes towards creation in general. A consumptive, utilitarian outlook, even if restricted with quotas, can hardly be conducive to cultivating human respect for the Earth, let alone encouraging people to see themselves as an integral part of creation rather than an extraneous and dominant force over it.

What makes the dolphin show a unique attraction is precisely the very thing that reduces the industry to the role of slave-trader, for behind the frozen clown-like smile, the optical illusion of flippering happiness, there is the grotesque tragedy of a highly-perceptive and intelligent being incarcerated to provide humans with entertainment and profit. But how do the dolphin dealers themselves rate the intelligence of their animal possessions? On one hand, as part of the whole publicity charade, they capitalise on the mystical aura of these animals, such as Windsor Safari Park declaring in their advertising blurb: 'You're bound to start wondering, "Am I watching them? Or are they watching me?"' Such promotion implicitly conveys the impression that the dolphins are not only content in their captivity but are virtually there by choice. Another view is given by Mike Riddell, the hard-headed military-style Director of Antibes Marineland who seems to regard the dolphin just as he would any other animal utilised by homo sapiens, declaring himself "fed-up to the back teeth with people who'd like to portray dolphins as super-intelligent extra-terrestrials visiting Earth from some enlightened civilisation." Others, less cynical, like Fredy Knie Snr, compare the dolphin's intelligence to that of a dog or ape.

But dolphins are not pets. They must work for a living, and if they refuse then in many cases they'll just go hungry. Indeed, it is an essential part of the Pavlovian conditioning regime that the dolphin must be kept sufficiently hungry in order to perform tricks at the command of the trainer. During show time, small morsels of food, judiciously controlled by the trainer, become the incentive and reinforcing stimulus for the animal to successfully accomplish each stunt. Any careful observer attending such a show will sometimes notice that a dolphin or sea-lion may not receive a reward after completing a certain trick. This, almost without exception, is because the stunt was not performed to the trainer's satisfaction - perhaps the jump not high enough, the response to a command too dilatory, or the exuberance of the animal just too impudent. As I learned from young dolphin trainer Rocky Colombo at Italy's Ocean World Aquarium, one of the first priorities in taming the newly caught and delivered dolphin is to condition its attention away from the underwater environment to the 'open-air' environment of the stage, the trainer, the props and the audience. To expedite this subtle form of brain-washing, the animal - much to its initial reluctance and instinctive fear - is actively encouraged to wriggle out of the water and onto the stage. Hunger and the tempting reward of a fish dangling just out of reach helps the dolphin to weigh up the decision on whether to trust human orders or animal instinct. No doubt the unparalleled deprivation of its new underwater home also motivates the dolphin to take a greater interest in the 'terrestrial world'. Conversely, perhaps this is why oceanaria consistently refuse to design pools which have some resemblance to the dolphin's multi-faceted undersea environment. Although it is technically feasible, the dolphin would then have little inducement to escape its chronic boredom and sing 'Happy Birthday' to the crowds. Deliberate punishment is also an integral part of the training regime, claims Doug Cartlidge: "The tricks are not performed because they enjoy doing them. First you find out how much they'll eat and still work. After that you condition the dolphin to associate certain hand signals with certain tricks that will result in the dolphin getting fish. You then find out if they are loners or prefer company because one of the punishments if they are not working properly is to lock them away on their own. You put them in a pen and ignore them. It's like psychological torture."

Yet the trainer also realises that being under constant stress, these are not exactly the peaceable, loving creatures that were once kidnapped from the sea. The animals show their anger by snapping their jaws, or speeding towards a swimming trainer as if to ram him, only veering away at the last moment. With a memory as long as the legendary elephant's, the dolphin will also bide its time before wreaking its vengeance for any blow or blatant injustice that it has suffered at the hands of the trainer. Conny Gasser's dolphin Flipper (No.1) for example, having received a cuff from his nervous and overworked trainer while on tour in the Far East, waited several weeks until the ideal opportunity presented itself to take revenge. The moment came during a show in Indonesia as the trainer leaned precariously out over the pool for the spectacular climax where the dolphin would leap out of the water to gently snatch a fish dangling from his lips. Defying the training manual, Flipper burst out of the water, and, ignoring the fish, slammed the trainer in the head, rendering him unconscious.

Perhaps even more than the human prisoner, every single aspect of the dolphin's life is controlled by its keepers, from the administering of food to the actual chemical composition of the environment in which the animal swims. Known as 'synthetic sea-water,' it is composed of H20, chlorine, salt and hydrochloric acid and, as many dolphins have discovered to their great cost, it is held at a vital and precarious balance. Says Pilleri: "Salt is expensive, particularly the large amounts needed to get the osmotic pressure identical to the natural habitat. What is usually achieved is little more than brackish water." Doug Cartlidge goes further: "If the zoo visitor were to see a chimp with its skin peeling off, a tiger with its eyes screwed tightly shut, an elephant with its whole body irritated by a chemical imbalance in its environment, how long would it be before something was done? Captive marine mammals endure all this as well as many more discomforts due to water problems. Unfortunately few visitors understand these problems."

But perhaps the deadliest of all for the dolphin is boredom. As 'occupational therapy', dressage undoubtedly helps to relieve the stultifying monotony of their 24 hours a day locked in a concrete prison, but to pretend that the dolphins actually enjoy training and performing is rather like saying that the human prisoner enjoys the twice-daily half hour spent in the exercise yard. Three, four, five times a day the captive animals, in whatever dolphinarium one cares to look, are required to perform the same stale and frivolous routine. Says Switzerland's pre-eminent dolphin showman Conny Gasser: "One show a day would be too little - dolphins have to be moved. In the sea they would swim for kilometres when accompanying the ships on their journey."

"Dolphins in captivity have been stolen from the wild," Professor Pilleri insists. "It is nothing short of torture to take these animals - who are accustomed to the infinite beauty of the open seas, covering vast distances at speeds sometimes reaching 60km an hour - and then imprison them in tiny concrete or metal pools." The tedious uniformity of the captive dolphin's environment, he adds, is a universal trait of all dolphinaria, from the most sophisticated establishments in the USA, to the most menial travelling show. "In the sea the environment is multi-dimensional," explains Pilleri, "with interesting plants, animals and scenery. In the pool, there is literally nothing." It takes only a little insight, he suggests, to recognise that a dolphin held under such conditions must become psychologically deformed. Indeed, Pilleri believes that captivity, coupled with the destruction of the dolphin's sophisticated social structure, causes "profound psychological disturbance, and neurotic behaviour almost identical to that of humans when held in solitary confinement." These symptoms, he adds, "exacerbated by the utterly degrading tricks they are forced to perform in captivity," include loss of communication, despair and suicidal behaviour, and an unnatural aggression probably induced by feelings of intense claustrophobia. "Such disorders," Pilleri believes, "are not only apparent in the form of neurotic, compulsive acts symptomatic of stereotyped prison behaviour, but also in more subtle ways such as the refusal to reproduce."

Twenty years ago, the marine explorer and film-maker Jacques-Yves Cousteau came to roughly the same conclusion after seeing his own captive dolphins commit suicide. The animals, confined for study, quite simply hit their heads against the hard edge of the pool until they died. This prompted an anguished Cousteau to recommend that the animals be left in their natural environment: "The dolphin's life in a pool leads to a confusion of the entire sensory apparatus, which in turn causes in such a sensitive creature a derangement of mental balance and behaviour. Moreover an inner spiritual crises is produced by the destruction of the social structure." Suicide, which has no relation to mass-strandings of dolphins and whales, has never been witnessed in the wild, except as some individuals appear to panic and take their own lives during capture. Once in confinement, the animals may also attempt to starve themselves to death, so that force-feeding becomes necessary.

According to one of Pilleri's most controversial findings, once in captivity, cetaceans gradually begin to suffer from severe mutism, a phenomenon which manifests itself both in the cessation of high-frequency echo-sounding for the purposes of orientation, and in two-way communication. As with other wild species held in captivity, he claims, dolphin brains have been found to shrink by up to 42%, with the regions responsible for communication most affected. Upon reflection, such degeneration seems inevitable. To begin with, the dolphins have no need to use sound for hunting purposes since dead fish are provided as a minimum wage. Indeed, as the Russian cetacean scientist Awenir Tomilin reported in 1974, hunting reflexes and prey-catching-reactions sometimes become so suppressed in captivity that the animals will make no attempt to hunt living prey in their pool even when hungry. Secondly, the tedious and all too familiar uniformity of the environment not only renders the use of echo-location meaningless, but it has also been suggested that high-frequency sound waves bouncing off a circular steel or concrete wall can cause distressing disorientation to the animals. Says whale specialist Dr Petra Deimer: "If, in their innate way, the animals would make use of their 'acoustic eye' in a normal dolphinarium pool, they would feel at the very least like a man in a labyrinth of mirrors."

Perhaps it is even less surprising that communication suffers between neurotic animals in a crippled social structure, mindlessly performing the same routine day in and day out. Daring to look at it from the dolphin's point of view for once, perhaps there is basically nothing much to say about a featureless concrete prison. The Dutch communications scientist Dr. Cees Kamminga, of the Technical University of Delft, confirmed Pilleri's findings during a comprehensive study of captive toothed whales' expressions of sound. At Duisburg Zoo in Germany, for instance, Kamminga used a hydrophone to tape the 'verbalisations' of white whales or belugas which, because of their unique songs, are also known as the 'canaries of the polar seas'. But despite many hours of determined effort by the director of the Duisburg Zoo, Dr. Wolfgang Gewalt, and one of his trainers, the animals remained silent, prompting the Dutch scientist to confirm what dolphin owners so vociferously deny: "In captive toothed whales I observed a constant decline in the quantity and intensity of their sound utterings."

In 1983, at the IWC Whales Alive! conference held in Boston, cetacean scientists recommended that dolphinaria should, "in due course", be replaced with coastal marine reserves, an idea long favoured by Professor Pilleri. Though perhaps fenced-off from the surrounding ocean, the dolphins would nevertheless be free to come and go as they please, indeed, to choose whether or not they would like contact with human beings. The only 'performance' for the public would be the experience of observing the dolphins' natural and spontaneous interaction with each other. Devoid of pretence and artificiality, such marine parks could serve the legitimate needs of both education and science. Unfortunately, this more enlightened solution seems a very long way off, and being a realist who prefers some measure of improvement now rather than ten years hence, Cartlidge is prepared to be slightly more lenient in his demands. "If they must keep dolphins I would like to see similar set-ups to the Living World exhibit in Florida," he says. "There, the dolphins are surrounded by underwater flora and fauna, can eat whenever they want because the pool teems with fish, and revolutionary filtration techniques means the water is crystal clear and free from any dangerous build up of added chemicals. There is also no degrading show, though people go in to watch the dolphins play."

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