5. THE GLOBAL INDUSTRY
5.1 USA and South America
The American Dream
As the descendants of the Mayflower fanned out across the New World in their covered wagons, taming the land and its indigenous peoples with the bible and the bullet, the circus-like merry-go-round of dream versus reality became firmly embedded in the American psyche. Confronted by an immense, unfamiliar and intimidating wilderness, many of these first pioneers and settlers, inwardly pining for comfort despite all their showy bravado, subsisted spiritually on tall stories and golden hopes of the future. It was thus that the strange and paradoxical American Dream was born, a soft sweet with a hard-boiled centre, a seductive illusion encasing a harsh reality, a pretence of moral altruism all too often veiling a ruthless competition for wealth and self-aggrandisement. It may be said that the same unquenchable passion for make-believe is evident almost anywhere, given the natural human impulse to escape the common afflictions of daily life, the dreary routine of the work-place, the spiritual deprivation of the modern city, the stress of the rat race, or just plain chronic unhappiness. But it was in the USA that the manufacture of make-believe first became a national institution, mass-produced to feed a hungry world, a unique synthesis of commerce and fantasy typified by the conveyor-belt offerings of the "Hollywood Dream-Machine" and the boundless wonders of Disneyland. Small wonder then that in this surfeit of lucrative unreality, the idea of happy dolphins in minuscule concrete pools was destined to thrive.
As we have already seen, the pioneer of the contemporary dolphinarium was circus chieftain P.T. Barnum who displayed white whales in his New York Museum of freaks in 1860. Like most of his other exhibits, Barnum's mermaid-whales were no more than disposable gimmicks and, confined to tiny metal tanks, their swift and sudden deaths only added to their magic and mystique. Barnum's fitful attempts at whale and porpoise husbandry were followed by Marine Studios of Marineland in Florida, which, also under the pretext of public education, began keeping small, toothed cetaceans in 1938. But what set the dolphin entertainment industry on its money-spinning course, providing it with a sudden boom in consumer demand, was the 1962 B-movie Flipper, directed by James B. Clark, and starring Chuck Conners and a conscripted dolphin from the Miami Seaquarium. The film, an irrevocably poor production only salvaged by some endearing acting by the dolphin, was dedicated to "Adolf Frohn who trained the first dolphin 13 years ago" at Marine Studios in Florida. Although make-believe in the archetypal Hollywood style, the film, with pungent irony, inadvertently seems to condemn the very idea of cetaceans in captivity. When 12-year old Sandy Ricks finds a wounded dolphin stranded on the Florida coastline, his first impulse is to tie it to his skiff, take it to his seaside home, nurse it back to health, and then proceed to hold dolphin shows for the neighbourhood kids. But the crux of the story is the release of Flipper - on the insistence of Sandy's disciplined yet caring 'Paw', a homespun fisherman played by ex-gunslinger Chuck Conners. Initially heart-broken, the boy soon re-establishes his relationship with Flipper, but this time in the dolphin's natural environment, the wild. There can be little doubt that this inconvenient discrepancy between fact and fantasy escaped the attention of the film's audience, principally children in their most impressionable years. Few must have realised that in several shots, wounds are even visible under the dolphin's flippers, consistent with poor handling in transportation.
The movie proved so successful at the box office that a long-running TV series followed, with yet more implausible adventures featuring the free-swimming dolphin. Flipper, the Hollywood star, superseded Fury the black stallion and Lassie the collie dog in the hearts and minds of children. All this kitsch of course did wonders for the nascent dolphin industry, as witnessed by the hundreds of newly caught animals to be christened 'Flipper'. The dolphin deaths were all too easy to conceal, recalls Doug Cartlidge. "If one died another would be bought from somewhere else, tipped into the pool and renamed Flipper." Rapidly becoming an international craze, the 'Flipper Show' concept was flogged for all it was worth - flipper tee-shirts, flipper water-wings, flipper beach towels. With new dolphin shows sprouting everywhere - and with no laws to inhibit capture or keeping in the most primitive conditions - the only problem was for supply to keep abreast with constant demand. As is so often the case whenever megabucks are at stake, the alluring American Dream shielded a more sordid American Reality: behind the exaggerated smile of the dolphin painted onto the billboards of the travelling Flipper shows, the animals were actually being so ruthlessly exploited that they were dying en masse, their entire lives reduced to nothing more than feeding the shark jaws of the industry's cash registers.
Like any gold-rush, this free-for-all also attracted a bizarre spectrum of humanity, from beach boys to professional wrestlers, trapeze artists to fishermen, investment brokers to New Age cultists. The trailblazing sub-culture was not without its criminal elements, including those with Mafia ties. It has even been alleged that one dolphin dealer stuffed his dead show animal with cocaine in a lucrative smuggling operation from South America to Europe - assuring customs officials that the animal was merely 'sedated'. Perhaps it is axiomatic of the dolphin trade that many companies at the time were fly-by-night, founded on an unexpected opportunity but expiring as soon as the cash and dolphin flow shrank to a trickle and then dried up. Says Rudolph Jäckle, a dolphin-catcher in South Africa during the boon years: "After the Marine Mammal Act came into force in 1972 it became more difficult - you couldn't buy dolphins any more, you know, like sausages. Before '72 you could go to the States and buy any dolphins you wanted to."
It was in the Florida Keys that most of the dolphin catchers set-up shop to supply animals to circuses and amusement parks around the world - men like Jerry Mitchell who founded the Marine Productions International Corporation, and who provided most of Europe with dolphins during the heydays of the late 1960's. Or entrepreneurs like Harvey L. Hamilton - "dolphin catcher and trainer" with "eleven years experience", who even today continues to be owner and operator of Florida's Ocean Attractions Inc. Most dolphin-trading at the time, including imports and exports, was so frenetic in order to keep pace with demand that no accurate records were kept of dolphin deaths and replacements. Indeed, the industry was quick to realise that its very survival was dependent upon the public's unquestioning faith in the dolphins' happiness, well-being and longevity. It was for this reason alone that secrecy and deception became instrumental in preserving the lucrative lie. It was, after all, a conveyor-belt industry, mass production and mass-consumption, with the dealers taking no notice of an animal's pregnancy, motherhood, illness, or nervous collapse. They were simply caught, stored for as short a time as possible, and then shipped. In 1967 for example, Jerry Mitchell even exported a mother dolphin and her suckling from Key Largo to a seasonal show in Wales. Attempts were made to forcibly extract milk from the mother for the baby, but this failed, and the calf died after just two days. Even 8 years later - and despite those ritual claims of the industry of constant self-improvement - researcher W. A. Walker cited a 40% death rate during capture operations in Florida. The implications of this become evident when one realises that by 1976 there were 286 bottlenose dolphins and 17 orcas in captivity in the USA alone, as well as 54 other species of whale. The history of orcas in captivity began in 1961 when an opportunistic Marineland in California caught an ailing fully grown female which had apparently strayed into Newport harbour. It survived for just two days, but it marked the beginnings of a new fad for captive killer whales. From November 1961 to March 1976, 303 orcas were caught alive in American waters, relates Prof. Paul Schauenberger. Of these, 237 were released again, 56 were taken into captivity, and ten died during capture and transportation.
Riding on the crest of the Flipper wave, it was the American dealer and showman James W. Tiebor who shipped the first dolphins from Florida to Europe for exhibit in 1966. The exotic displays were greeted with such public acclaim that Tiebor soon found himself carting the dolphins all over Europe to expositions, agricultural and trade fairs. The deaths, deprivation and cruelty that the dolphins suffered in such travelling shows amounted to little more than an inconvenience for an industry which regarded these animals not as individuals or even living beings, but simply as disposable commodity items with a limited shelf-life and "planned obsolescence". Though they routinely succumbed to disease, injury or suicide, replacements - often christened with the same names as their fallen predecessors - were freely and cheaply available from the USA, South America and South Africa. In the heydays of the 1960's, a carnival atmosphere suffused the dolphin industry, one of free-spending, driving ambition and luck, the American Dream come true. The result was intoxication, blindness, self-delusion, the inability to determine where the fantasy of the show began and where it stopped. Often, the suffering of the condemned was not even recognised, and perhaps that is the saddest thing of all.
With the advent of tougher laws regulating the capture sector of the dolphin industry, there followed a period of recession and also a much deeper crisis of confidence. Desperation among the dolphin cowboys, previously renowned for their swagger and conceit, sometimes resulted in drunken bar brawls and cases of illegal capture and smuggling. Despite such rashes of activity, for the small entrepreneur, the boom years of almost unlimited profit, Florida sunshine and the pretentious depiction of their own ramshackle ventures as 'corporations' were over for good.
As the more insecure of the rogue dolphin dealers discovered to their great cost when the law slammed down to decapitate their activities, a healthy bank balance and the right connections can do wonders for company prestige and personal self-confidence, not to mention business survival. As the saying goes, nothing succeeds quite like success. It was thus that the larger and more robust enterprises, boasting efficient managerial skills and secure capital, entered a period of consolidation, lapping up the equipment and occasionally the expertise of their fallen brethren. Like the most hardy and tenacious of weeds, they put down roots deep into mainstream society, their executives hobnobbing with the well-to-do, with fellow businessmen, bankers, and politicians. It is thus that even today one can still find the names of the industry's most notorious dolphin cowboys of the sixties - now in smart business suits, managers of dolphinaria and amusement parks with a brittle front of respectability, a Potemkin facade behind which there is the same old treadmill of exploitation, death and replacement. It must be said that tougher laws, coupled with a seemingly inexhaustible human weakness for euphemism and pretension, have inadvertently helped them on their way to respectability - with today's dolphin catches called "scientifically controlled" and "humane", and the animals' life-long captivity justified in the name of children's education and scientific research.
Today, comparatively few specialised dolphin catchers have managed to survive, feeding, with their compatriots in Japan, Central and South America, New Zealand and Australia, the global industry's constant hunger for dolphins. They include the International Animal Exchange based in Ferndale, Michigan, perhaps the world's largest company specialising in the trade in exotic species and which supplies dolphins to numerous establishments in the USA and Europe. In Key Largo, Florida, which is still a base for many dolphin catching operations, there is Dolphins Plus Inc., run by Lloyd A. Borguss. Another well-known dealer, Mobi Solangi, not only catches dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, but also runs a string of travelling dolphin shows. Also based in the Keys is Dolphin Services International, led by Dr. Jay C. Sweeney who styles himself as an "Aquatic Animal Veterinarian attending international clientele, and Collector of Marine Mammals since 1971". His fellow director, and also captain of the Dolphin Doll, one of the speedboats used to chase the dolphin schools to exhaustion, is Gene Hamilton, "a Commercial Fisherman since 1940, and respected Dolphin Collector since 1964." One of Hamilton's regular clients is the US Navy, and its $30 million per year marine mammal programme. The company's sales brochure assures potential clients of a full and professional service with "personal attention", including "Preparation of US Permits," and "Arrangements for all aspects of transport: transporters and stretchers, logistical details and swift routing from Miami International Airport." Only "Quality Dolphins" are offered for sale after capture by an "experienced, careful collecting crew." As if to reassure the customer, the brochure continues, point by point: "Healthy, alert dolphins; bright show quality"; "Will deliver to your size and sex specifications"; "Acclimation pens located in crystal clear natural ocean lagoon" in the Florida Keys; "Dolphins accustomed to hand feeding with top quality fish." And of course, just in case that dolphin you bought is not so healthy and alert after all, there is a "90 day replacement guarantee."
Despite cosmetic refinements, dolphin catching is as ugly as it ever was, though the expense has become astronomical. Most are still caught in coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, but now, in this age of efficiency where time means money, a dolphin school will first be located using spotter aircraft. Then, equipped with nets, powerful motor launches move in, applying sustained pressure upon the dolphin school, chasing the animals to exhaustion. Slowly but surely the roar of the engines begins to disorientate the dolphins by disrupting sonar communication, so that the bewildered creatures finally end up swimming in ever-decreasing circles. Pulling up the nets, perhaps the first victims are found; those dolphins which became entangled and drowned, those that have injured themselves trying to escape, sometimes tearing off a flipper as they thrash around in panic. Then comes the strenuous effort of heaving the selected animals on board. A difficult and clumsy procedure at the best of times, many a dolphin has to be thrown back into the water, paralysed, after its spine has been injured. The boats then speed back to land, leaving the dolphin school with its own unseen, unrecognised bereavement, the sucklings which will die without their mothers to nurse them, the injured which are held aloft by their companions, perhaps for days until they take their last breath. The captured dolphins will suffer a similarly unenviable fate. Once they are transferred into acclimatisation pens, the animals, still in a state of shock but fortified with vitamins, antibiotics, and sedatives, will promptly begin to starve themselves to death. To prevent the lucrative investment dying on them, a gag is often employed to force-feed the captives and only gradually can they be encouraged to suppress their own instinctive revulsion for eating dead fish.
Although the specialised capture business is only a shadow of its former self, dolphins and whales are still very much in demand, so much so that the managers of oceanaria sometimes feel obliged to mount their own capture operations when the need arises, either to replenish their own supplies or to sell to others. They include people like Bob Wright and his Sealand in Victoria, British Colombia, who gained much notoriety for his captures of orca whales. Also in Canada is John Hickes, the half-Scottish, half-Eskimo businessman who trades in Beluga whales. The hunt takes place each summer as the white whales migrate to the warmer waters of Manitoba to give birth in the estuary of the Churchill River. Fast motor launches are used to chase and herd the whales, with Hickes' team of hunters beating the sides of their boats to disorientate the animals. Once a whale is driven into shallow water, then rather than using a net, a lasso is thrown over it. In rapid succession, one of the catchers, poised on the bow of the launch, jumps onto the animal's back and, in much the same way as steers are ridden by bronco-busting cowboys in Texas, the frenzied animal is ridden until is eventually subdued. The hunters then check to see whether their prey's sex, age and length complies to requirements; if it does, the whale is hauled ashore and consigned, pending sale and transport, to a rusting tank not much larger than a toddler's paddling pool. Other individuals, deemed unsuitable for sale, are simply abandoned. Describing the 1989 hunt, journalist Kevin Toolis reported: "Some don't survive to be rejected. They die, battered by the boats which have persistently rammed them." Toolis quoted Anne Doncaster, of the International Wildlife Coalition as saying: "The hunters laugh and scream. You would think they were having the time of their lives. There is this awful whoop of triumph when they find the right one. You would think they had conquered Everest instead of catching some poor animal. They say they are after adolescents, but it is more like stealing eight-year old children." Hickes however, was unrepentant over his "bronco-busting" activities. He declared: "We literally jump on the whale's back and hold on to it by a small piece of rope. In previous years we used nets and loop snares. These are dangerous and very stressful to the mammal. You can either drown it or cut it up badly. In 'busting' there is a stress factor involved for the animal. Their white cell counts go real high. But it's hard to say what it's like. I'm not a whale. I can't tell you how it feels."
In San Diego, California, there is Sea World Incorporated, probably the most prestigious of the American oceanariums. In 1973, under the pretext of scientific research, Sea World captured ten orcas valued at five million dollars. The resulting controversy ended with the amusement park having its capture permit revoked by a US court - but not for long. In 1976, Sea World again set about catching orcas, this time off Washington State, near Seattle. But in the resulting furore, the oceanarium was forced to release them. Undaunted, in 1983, Sea World proposed the capture of 100 Alaskan orcas for scientific study, including invasive research such as liver biopsies, extraction of teeth and stomach-pumping. At the same time - and almost incidentally - it would also take 10 of the animals back to Sea World. Although permission was granted by the Federal authorities, there was public outrage in Alaska - where it was widely suspected that the research was no more than a convenient smoke-screen for a commercial company to obtain, free of charge, 10 orcas worth 5 million dollars. Alaska's Governor declared that the State would not endorse the Federal permit, and although this had no standing in law, even Sea World was loathe to inflame Alaskan hostility by going ahead with the plan. But even this did not put a stop to the oceanarium's cetacean catches. In early 1984, Sea World attempted to import twelve Commerson dolphins from Patagonia - listed as a threatened species by IUCN - and at least five of the animals promptly died.
Despite its ferocious-sounding name, no records exist of any killer whale ever making an unprovoked attack on a human being. And so what happened at Sea World in 1987 is especially significant. Indeed, despite the much-vaunted pseudo-scientific research into cetacean-human communication at US dolphinaria, none of the four orcas confined to the establishment had ever been heard to utter any reason for turning on their two trainers and nearly killing them. This time, no amount of institutionalised secrecy could contain the scandal, perhaps because much more than "animal rights" were at stake - never a very valuable commodity when measured against profit. According to journalist Robert Reinhold, writing in the International Herald Tribune, 21-year old trainer Jonathon Smith, while in the pool on March 4 1987, "was hit on the back by a male orca, grabbed in the jaws of another, dragged down and smashed against the bottom of the 12m deep pool. He suffered a lacerated liver, heavy internal bleeding and other injuries." Then on 21 November, another trainer, 26-year old John Sillick, was attacked. As he performed one of Sea World's star-turns, riding on the back of a six-ton orca, one of the other animals rammed him and he suffered a broken back, hip, pelvis, leg and ribs. As information leaks turned into a veritable flood, it was disclosed that there had been no less that 14 "recent accidents" involving the whale trainers at Sea World, yet to preserve image and profits no changes had been made to the show, in training methods or handling of the whales.
At that time, the corporate parent of Sea World was Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., the publishing and insurance empire based in Orlando, Florida. The Sea World whales, reported Robert Reinhold, "are the superstars of three - soon to be four - marine theme parks that have become the most profitable arm of the company that is desperately cash-hungry because its debt grew to $2.7 billion last year fighting off a takeover by Robert Maxwell, the British publisher." Sea World draws approximately 4 million visitors a year, with adults forking out $19.95 as entrance fees for themselves and $14.95 for their children.
Predictably, the Harcourt management quickly resorted to "damage control" to protect its image and reassure the public as to the suitability of the whale spectacle for family entertainment, by firing its three top managers at Sea World. The publishing conglomerate dismissed charges that they were ultimately to blame because pressure for profits was causing the whales added strain, and the trainers to take risks and make mistakes. The behavioural abnormalities of the whales are said to have become apparent shortly after Harcourt, moving to drive competitors out of business, took over and closed down Hanna-Barbera's Marineland in Rancho Palos Verdes near Los Angeles. The establishment's killer whales, Orky and Corky, were shipped to San Diego to join Sea World's orcas. It was speculated that their arrival - especially that of Orky, an aggressive male - had sparked the social disorders, with the inexperienced trainers unable to interpret the drastic change of mood in the pool. Yet Harcourt dismissed such allegations and although faced with an increasingly bitter controversy it was a defiant William Jovanovich who took the stage to distance the publishing empire from the implied incompetence of Sea World's president, chief trainer and zoological director. "The fact-finding by our committee showed that there was negligence," the flamboyant Jovanovich declared. "There was not a supervisor in the park near the stadium, which there was supposed to be at all times. It showed that three of the trainers had such meagre training it was a wonder they could even perform the most elementary aspects of their positions." According to the Los Angeles Times, Jovanovich went on to criticise the training methods of chief trainer David Butcher, describing his philosophy of cultivating a personal relationship with the whales as seriously flawed, in contrast to more "traditional behaviourist methods of punishment and reward."
For Sea World, the episode cast a shadow over its year-long festivities to celebrate its 25th anniversary, especially since Harcourt were suddenly in no mood for spectacular and risky stunts. The orca show was abruptly given a new format, stripped of bare-back riding and young trainers trustfully placing their heads into the toothy jaws of the whales. The new president of Sea World, Robert K. Gault Jr., was quoted as saying: "We were doing some very spectacular things that enhanced the show value, but we overemphasised the importance of the entertainment." That was an admission indeed, coming from an establishment which normally prides itself on its 'educational' value. But predictably, Harcourt's moratorium on the most spectacular elements of the show was limited to the time-span of the scandal being erased from the public memory. Six months later, the trainers were back in the tanks with the killer whales and it was 'business as usual'. But in September 1988, Orky died - just 18 months after being moved from Marineland. The whale had lost almost a third of its body weight, prompting charges that the animal had "starved to death." Orky was the fourteenth Sea World orca to die in captivity since 1965.
Unfortunately for the image of Sea World, the remaining orcas' behavioural problems continued to deteriorate, eventually culminating in a devastating blow to public relations. In August 1989, Sea World's orca whale Kandu died after colliding at high speed with her partner Corky during a children's show. Witnesses declared that blood from the blowhole of the mortally wounded whale spurted over 6m into the air. Her jaw broken, Kandu eventually bled to death while shocked parents and children apparently had to be escorted out of the stadium. One spectator was quoted as saying: "I saw one whale with a huge gash ripped in its side like it had been harpooned or something. It leaped out of the water with a huge groan. I knew it was her death rattle - and then there was blood, loads of it. It dirtied the whole pool and you couldn't see the water. It was just all blood. Women and children had to look away." Sea World spokesmen speculated that Corky had smashed into Kandu deliberately, out of jealousy over the attentions of the male orca Namu, who was penned-up at the time. The incident prompted whale expert Erich Hoyt to declare that "There has never been a known case of a killer whale killing another killer whale in captivity or even in the wild."
And so once again, Sea World was obliged to use all the ingenuity it could muster for the sake of 'damage control.' Said a report in the San Diego Union: "Sea World officials. . . apparently instructed employees to downplay the violent nature of Monday's bloody encounter. 'It actually resulted because of a little bit of playing between the two whales,' one cashier said. 'They weren't fighting,' said another with a smile. 'They were altercating.'" The final official line was: "The outcome of this particular case was tragic, yet the incident was representative of common behaviour that is unrelated to captivity, show presentations or the level of daily activity of the whales." Reacting to the charge that corporate profits have a greater value than animal welfare at Sea World, Jackie Hill, Vice President of Communications, declared: "Sea World is not ashamed of being a profit making company. We are part of the economic structure of a free nation, returning profits to our shareholders." She went on to describe the standards of animal care at Sea World as "exemplary" and its facilities as "state of the art." Not all Sea World trainers would agree, however. Quoted in The Killing Tanks, an article by US journalist Gary Hanauer, one former trainer who left Sea World after being injured in an accident in 1984, declared that they were "ordered to administer oral drugs to the animals without knowing what they were, to spray paint the stump of a whale's amputated dorsal fin to make it appear normal, and to shake a dead whale on a stretcher to make it look as though the animal was still moving." Reeling from its plague of animal welfare scandals, and still desperate for cash after its takeover battle and increasingly media-shy over the scandals at Sea World, Harcourt recently sold the establishment to the multimillion dollar brewery corporation Anheuser-Busch, based in St. Louis, Missouri.
All the rage at the moment on the U.S. dolphin scene are "swim programmes" where the animals are more or less leased by the half-hour to Hawaii and Florida holidaymakers at a price of up to $65 per person. Dolphin-catching vet Dr. Jay Sweeney runs his exhibit at the $360 million Hyatt Regency hotel in Waikoloa, Hawaii, where, in a "high-tech", "state of the art" lagoon, six dolphins are involved in seven "encounters" a day with hotel guests. So lucrative is this new form of entertainment that according to one official of the National Marine Fisheries Service, "Every hotel in Hawaii wants to put a dolphin in the pool." The dangers posed to the dolphins by human infection - and to the swimmers themselves by dolphins that suddenly begin to face their claustrophobia with an uncharacteristic aggression - have so far been ignored, and although the authorities seem keen to regulate this booming side-show, they are proving so popular that an outright ban seems unlikely.
Indeed, the never-ending controversy in the dolphin industry and the perceived inadequacy of the law has also had the effect of putting the National Marine Fisheries Service on the defensive, the federal body which administers the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Declares Nancy Daves Hicks of the Animal Protection Institute of America (API): "In 1988, API undertook a complete review of captive marine mammal issues to determine whether or not the federal agencies charged with regulating marine mammal capture and care were doing an effective job." API discovered, according to Hicks, that "the permit process is so automatic and routine that only when a facility is outrageously unfit or there is threat of litigation will a permit application be rejected. Of 261 applications for display permits forwarded to the Marine Mammal Commission for review, only 8 were denied."
South America
Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Guatemala and Cuba - these countries began to play a pivotal role in the dolphin industry when the US Marine Mammal Act came into force, compensating for the sudden shortfall in supplies. In Argentina until the early 1980's, there was Avelino H. Cobreros' American Fauna whose advertisements offered Commerson or Jacobita dolphins for 12,000 dollars. These animals had been "tamed in ponds" measuring just 3 x 6 x 1m prior to shipment, and Cobreros, in all seriousness, advised potential customers that the dolphins should be kept either in "sea or sweet-water" at a temperature of "8 to 19 degrees", although "other varieties are also acceptable." In Arica, Chile, there is Lothar Schwark, a Swiss expatriate who in the past has also specialised in the capture of Commerson dolphins. The Commerson, with its exquisite black and white markings, became a sudden fad in European amusement parks in the early eighties - until it was discovered that the animal's survival span in captivity rendered it uneconomic. Nevertheless, it is thought that Schwark was behind two 1984 efforts to import Commerson dolphins into Germany.
Based in Mexico is another Swiss, Heinz Hugentobler, who in 1978 supplied four dolphins to Bruno Lienhardt's International Dolphin Show, and one to Heinz Pelzer's Safaripark in Gross-Gerau, Germany. In 1985 he was involved in the sale of a trained 4.5 ton orca whale from Toronto to Mexico City for the staggering sum of a quarter of a million dollars.
But it is in Fidel Castro's revolutionary Cuba that dolphin catching in South America has been given a new lease of life, under the auspices of the quasi state-run enterprise Acuario Nacional. Complains trainer Rocky Colombo of Italy's Ocean World Aquarium, who lost two dolphins supplied by Acuario Nacional within as many years: "They send over the dolphins healthy or sick - it doesn't matter to them."
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