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5. THE GLOBAL INDUSTRY

5.8   Bruno Lienhardt and the International Dolphin Show

The Strange Case Of Bruno "Houdini" Lienhardt

During his 18 years in the business, Bruno Lienhardt of Einsiedeln, Switzerland, has gained the dubious distinction of being one of the world's most notorious dolphin dealers. Although a razor-sharp entrepreneur, Lienhardt could also be likened to an outstanding circus showman, an Houdini-like character who has been able to extricate himself, entirely unscathed, from one animal abuse scandal after another. He obtained his first two dolphins in 1971 from Walter Moser's Sea Artist Enterprises which was then under contract to supply a Flipper show to the "National Circus" of the Gebrüder Knie. By October 1984, Lienhardt's International Dolphin Show was described by the French newspaper Libération as one of Europe's leading specialists in the capture of dolphins, sharing that privileged position with Peter Bössenecker's Société Biologique des Caraibes.

Debbie Steele, Ingrid Killer and Peter Moses have all worked for the IDS at one time or another. Parting company with Gasser after the cruel fiasco of the Far East, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire for Ingrid and Peter as they agreed to take care of three dolphins in a Lienhardt show at the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, in 1974. Moses later went on to catch dolphins for Lienhardt in Taiwan. For Debbie Steele, recruitment into the Lienhardt ranks occurred unexpectedly in 1982 when the boss himself personally appointed her head trainer of an IDS dolphin show at the giant Walibi amusement park in Wavre, Belgium, 22 km from Brussels. "By this time," says Steele, "Lienhardt must have been raking in a fortune. He had dolphins at the Moulin Rouge, at Viareggio in Italy, at Safariland in Germany and Walibi in Belgium."

When she arrived to take up her position as head trainer at Walibi, Debbie Steele was again confronted by crude and shabby facilities. "The water was like pea soup and two out of the three filters weren't working. The temperature was 6 degrees and it should have been between 19 and 24 degrees. Both dolphins, Boy and Missy, were very ill. They'd been fed on mackerel all the time they were in captivity and one had stomach ulcers and the other had mackerel poisoning. The mackerel had been kept in the freezer for fourteen months and you should only keep it for three. We managed to nurse them back to health but when I complained very strongly to Lienhardt about the bad fish, and insisted on buying proper food for them, he told me it cost too much money. Eventually - just six months after I started - he told me to pack my bags and get out. Ten days after I left I heard that Boy had died of a hernia because they'd lifted the jumps another meter."

The company operations of the IDS are based in Bruno Lienhardt's house in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. Officially though, it has its home in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, yet this is little more than a convenient postbox company, up until 1987 run by the Fundationsanstalt Vaduz of Dr Peter Marxer who acted as a paper-director of the IDS. After a row blew up over contracts, the IDS shifted to another postbox company in Vaduz run by Dr. Horst Marxer. Such disputes over money and contracts have been a regular and somewhat tedious feature in almost every Lienhardt venture, from the time he stole his own dolphins in Italy, to the occasion when he abandoned his animals in a hotel swimming pool in Cairo. Although the son of a respected family doctor in Einsiedeln, it was not long before Bruno became the black sheep of the Lienhardt family, a ne'er-do-well who eventually squandered his parent's estate. Bruno had a fascination for the glamour of the "good life" and when he had money, he liked to show it off to friends and acquaintances, talking and spending big. He never wasted any love on the animals, not even those that provided for him. People who have known him paint a picture of a man both ruthless and dangerous. Debbie Steele: "About 40 to 45 years of age. Looks like a typical Swiss farmer, gnome-like, with ruddy cheeks and a red nose. But as some people have discovered to their great cost, you should never cross him." Ingrid Killer: "Lienhardt shouldn't be allowed anywhere near dolphins. He's just not fit to keep them. He has no feelings at all for any animal. He's a real businessman and he doesn't care how many dolphins he loses."

The Moulin Rouge

For what it is worth, Bruno Lienhardt made his name - and much of his fortune too - by renting dolphins to the Bal du Moulin Rouge on Boulevard Clychy for fourteen years. It was at this romantic Paris hot-spot that the IDS dolphins appeared in the celebrated striptease revue 'Girls, Girls, Girls' - "a unique and highly popular attraction", according to Lienhardt's former girlfriend and confidant, Heidi Bader. Below the plush drapings and opulent stage settings of Moulin Rouge, in the establishment's squalid and murky cellar, three IDS dolphins - one as an emergency stand-in - were kept on hand, confined to a lift-up tank measuring just 4 x 5m. At the climax of the show, and evidently to rapturous applause, the half-starved animals would suddenly be elevated onto the stage, where, attracted by the scent of fresh fish, they would leap out of the water and rip away the showgirl's bra.

Lienhardt however, denies that the only way of achieving a consistent success in the act was by under-feeding the dolphins, insisting, as most wild animal tamers are prone to do, that all that is required is a measure of firmness and the hand of loving kindness. Although mounting criticism finally forced the closure of the revue in 1984, many dolphins are thought to have died in the cramped and primitive conditions. At this time Lienhardt owned at least 10 known dolphins which are almost certainly all dead today: Boy, Kiki, Tiny, Speedy, Missy, Zoe, Jelly, Jilly, Bobby and an animal called Nobody. Debbie Steele, working for Lienhardt in Belgium during this time, relates how she had to deliver a replacement dolphin to the Moulin Rouge: "It was in 1981, I think, while I was head trainer at Walibi. I spent two days in Paris and then came back to Belgium. The dolphin's name was Kiki, a small female, only about 4 or 5 years old. She was incredibly highly-strung and she hated being touched and hated being transported. She was going mad in the back of the van, jumping right out of the stretcher. I had to hold her down for the whole trip because they wanted to tranquillise her with Valium - but I would never use tranquillisers on a dolphin." Despite the show's success with the Moulin Rouge's clientele, there were also numerous complaints. When Greenpeace sued the police prefecture for failing to take action against the illegally-small tanks in which the dolphins were being kept, the management promptly dropped the revue. By this time in 1984, one dolphin had died of pneumonia, another was ailing and the French authorities, already accused of callousness and incompetence, did nothing to help their bruised image when the official veterinary officer referred to the dolphins rather contemptuously as "those fishes". Invoices from the IDS show that each dolphin was rented to the Moulin Rouge for 5000 Deutschmarks per month. Heidi Bader, Lienhardt's jilted girlfriend and former personal secretary, tensed when questioned about the welfare of the Moulin Rouge dolphins. "We never had any problems with the dolphins," she told me defiantly. "They were always healthy and were exchanged for others regularly. These would then be given rests in the south of France or somewhere warm and sunny." So not one dolphin died at the Moulin Rouge? "One did become sick with pneumonia." And did it die? "Yes, it did," she admitted reluctantly. After further questioning, Bader, an employee of the bank Schweizerische Kredit Anstalt in Zürich, but still a fellow-director of the IDS in Liechtenstein, finally lost her temper, declaring that during those fourteen years, "if one dolphin died it would be replaced by another one". The replacements usually came from Central America, captured during one of Lienhardt's many expeditions to Mexico and Guatemala. "Mr Lienhardt has been catching dolphins in Mexico for many years," Bader told me. "Within the statutes of the company, Mr Lienhardt has reserved the right to capture dolphins. The local fishermen usually know where to find them and they use their nets to capture them." An untrained dolphin, she said, will bring up to 20,000 dollars, "and a trained one more than double that, sometimes even reaching 80,000 dollars."

The 14-year long saga of the Moulin Rouge dolphins explains why many less flamboyant dealers have learned to despise Lienhardt. It is not only a question of image, but also of profit. Take the attitude of Mike Riddell, self-styled "Curator" of Antibes Marineland. Riddell grouses that it was Lienhardt's activities at the Paris strip-tease revue which provoked the French government to impose rigorous and costly new restrictions on dolphinariums - and indeed, these are still known in France as the Moulin Rouge Standards. Introduced in 1981, they required performance pools to have a surface area of at least 800m2 and a depth equal to one and a half times the average length of the species. They also obliged owners to cold-brand their dolphins for identification purposes. "Bruno Lienhardt should be shot," growls Riddell, "he's giving the whole industry a bad name." Hardly mute criticism perhaps, but as Secretary of the EAAM, a lobbying group that has invested much time and effort into inflating the industry's image as a caring, scientific, educational trust, the shrewd, military-style governor of Antibes Marineland realises only too well that Bruno Lienhardt has become a loose canon. What Riddell doesn't mention in his tirade against his former compatriot, is that it has taken eighteen years for the top echelons of the industry to condemn Lienhardt's activities. Hardly a word was muttered in protest before investigative journalists began to publish the lurid details of Lienhardt's abuse of dolphins. More importantly, such denunciations are designed expressly for public consumption, a kind of last resort which must somehow emphasise the inherent distinction between the reputable and disreputable dolphin dealer. There is at least one major flaw in this argument: without the continuing support of the mainstream of the industry, Lienhardt could not possibly survive. Indeed, he would have sunk without trace years ago.

By the time the striptease revue was axed, there was only one dolphin left at the Moulin Rouge, a small female called Niki. In frail health, she was transported to Walibi to join two of Lienhardt's other dolphins, Missy and Leo. All three were then imported into Switzerland on 9 October 1984 to join another pair of IDS dolphins, Girl and Nemo, being held temporarily at Connyland.

The Taiwan Massacre

Although raking in profits from Paris, Bruno Lienhardt soon came to realise that such amounts would pale into insignificance compared to what could be earned from mounting an ambitious dolphin catch. Bringing in thirty dolphins to Europe might net him over half a million dollars. He shared some of this dream with Heinz Pelzer, owner-manager of Safariland in Gross-Gerau near Frankfurt, also known as Pelzer Tier und Freizeitpark. At this time, Pelzer was on exceedingly friendly terms with the dolphin industry's black sheep, enjoying cosy business dealings which included sharing the spoils of previous dolphin catches - the result of Lienhardt forays into Mexico - and also Safariland's own lucrative IDS Flipper show, managed by the company's chief trainer Peter Moses.

It was early in 1980 that, having drummed-up orders for dolphins in Europe and wishing to replenish his own dwindling supply, Lienhardt decided to mount an operation to capture Aduncus bottlenose dolphins in Taiwan, eventually seconding Moses to be responsible for the transportation of the animals. The first phase of the catch was organised in association with the French scientist Prof. René Guy Busnel, a Lienhardt client who was attempting to buy up to twenty dolphins for NATO-connected scientific research on the military application of dolphin sonar. Now retired to Fontainebleau, Busnel was then director of the Laboratoire d'Acoustique Animale at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Jouy-en-Josas near Paris. The Taiwan capture was viewed with such importance by Busnel and Lienhardt that both men were on hand in oversee the operation.

According to Moses, "at least sixty dolphins died during or as a result of the Taiwan operation." The animals were caught at the Penghu islands, lying off the eastern shores of Taiwan. During misty weather, relates Moses, shoals of squid often drift towards the northern coasts of the islands, followed by schools of feeding dolphins. Twice during January and February, local fishermen were paid to take their boats out through the reefs and then chase the dolphins towards the island. By yelling and banging bamboo sticks against their boats to herd the animals, they were able to trap them in a small channel in the reefs which was then sealed off with nets. The dolphins were subsequently lifted out of the water and transported on open trucks to the harbour city of Makung where they were stored in temporary holding pens in the bay.

When about thirty dolphins died during this first phase of the catch, an incensed Lienhardt ordered further attempts, summoning Moses from Safariland to co-ordinate the operation and arrange transportation of the surviving dolphins. The animals being kept in the pens however, soon began to die in the filthy waters of Makung harbour. When Moses arrived he discovered that "there were only twelve dolphins left alive in the pens," and that the "project was so badly organised" that, in the absence of his boss who had already beaten a hasty retreat, he felt obliged to take command of it himself. He set about making unusually comprehensive check-lists on each and every dolphin that was caught.

Under Lienhardt's orders, the IDS had procured the services of the China Diving Enterprise in Taipei - a company which had previously organised another disastrous dolphin catch for Hong Kong's Ocean Park. With the assistance of the China Diving Enterprise, another 18 dolphins were put into the five temporary holding pens in the bay. China Diving's President, Steve S. Shieh, "guaranteed that there will be no injuries" and "no cruelty" to the dolphins. Although this statement was written after at least forty dolphins had been fatally maimed, it provided Lienhardt and Busnel with a comforting alibi in their dealings with the authorities. During this second phase, a minimum of eight dolphins died before transportation, including a calf. With ropes around their tails they were dragged ashore and, muddy and blood-stained, were discarded.

In March, while the dolphins were still in the holding pens, Moses's records reveal that one dolphin - evidently pushed beyond the limits of endurance - attacked the divers, and that all of the animals were then given Valium regularly. Via telephone and telex, Prof. René Guy Busnel was providing veterinary advice to Moses directly from Paris. Indeed, they stayed in close contact throughout the operation, as evidenced by the following telex dispatched to the Professor on 4 March: "Animals are looking good; vitamins and minerals are given carefully; fish not the best, but still usable; yesterday caught 15 new animals, total of dolphins now 27." From Paris, Busnel was also playing a key role in arranging transport, repeatedly assuring Moses that cargo flights were being booked and confirmed to take the animals to Europe.

In a hastily-arranged meeting on 15 March in Taipei, Busnel informed Moses that transport for the dolphins had been arranged for 31.03.80, all of the 22 animals to be flown in one batch. They also reviewed the health and general status of the animals, with the professor advising Moses on worm, antibiotic, hormone, vitamin, mineral and sedative treatments. Returning to Makung the following day, Moses discovered that dolphin No. 14 was dead and that the divers had taken it out of the pens but had discarded it nearby, letting it sink into the murky waters of the harbour. Moses notes that he complained bitterly about the possibility of infection but "they just nod their heads and don't show any understanding of what I mean, one of them saying, 'We've done this since the very first time we caught dolphins here.'" Moses then learnt that the transport scheduled for 31 March had been cancelled, a turn of events which once again illustrated the incompetence that plagued the entire operation. He was left to care for the dolphins as best he could, beset by inadequate veterinary care and difficulty in obtaining essential supplies, and even having to contend with a consignment of rotting fish intended as food for the dolphins. He notes in his reports that several of the dolphins had begun to suffer from pus-filled blisters despite regular injections of antibiotics. Still hearing no news from Paris or Switzerland, Moses, increasingly anxious and distraught, contacted Danzas airfreight on his own initiative, only to be told that the cargo flight could not be booked until the necessary funds had been received from Lienhardt. It was not until two weeks later that he finally obtained confirmation of the flight: a Boeing 707 bound for Frankfurt on 27 April.

On 26 April the surviving 22 dolphins were hoisted out of the water on stretchers and placed on open trucks to await transportation to the airstrip on the outskirts of Makung. With "four or five for each load," the dolphins were subsequently put aboard light aircraft bound for Taiwan's international airport. Steve S. Shieh's China Diving Enterprise was paid 22,264 dollars for those dolphins. But the following day, on 27 April, one dolphin died in the freight area. In his notebook, Moses wrote that "suddenly the dolphin reared-up and died, apparently because of sheer terror caused by aeroplane noise." Documents state that the original consignee was to have been the "bassin du dauphin" of the Zoo Marines, an amusement park operated by Willy Stone in Perpignan, the Pyrenees, France, which Lienhardt was apparently renting at the time. For legal and economic reasons however, this was changed to Heinz Pelzer's Safariland in Gross-Gerau in Germany. Bruno Lienhardt was charged 275,000 Deutschmarks for transportation of the dolphins to Germany by Danzas airfreight. Incredibly, as though they had been manufactured by one of the island's cheap industries, the customs papers for the 22 live dolphins declared that they had been "produced in Taiwan".

According to an article entitled "Penghu's Jet Set Dolphins" in Vista, a Taipei newspaper, "Prof. R. G. Busnel awaited their arrival in Frankfurt." But soon there were no dolphins left alive for the scientist and predictably, hearing of the debacle, Bruno Lienhardt had once again conveniently disappeared. Upon their arrival in Germany, the 21 remaining dolphins were transported to Safariland, but on the 28 April, a still-nursing calf perished and a day later his mother also died. Eight of the remaining dolphins were sent to Walibi in Belgium, Holiday Park in Hassloch, Germany, and to two other dolphinariums in Saarland and Luxembourg. Within two days of arrival at Neunkirchen, Saar, two more dolphins died, and of all the dolphins transported from Taiwan to Europe, says Moses, "not one has survived." Shocked by the disaster in Taiwan, Moses then retired permanently from the dolphin business.

Reached by telephone, Heinz Pelzer, whose name appears as consignee on several Taiwan documents, denied any involvement in the IDS catch. He also insisted that he had severed his connections with Safariland, selling out to a Herr Kinzler in November 1984, and subsequently giving up his managerial role. "There have been no dolphins at Safariland since 1982, when the dolphinarium was destroyed by a heavy storm," Pelzer declared. When it came to Lienhardt's Taiwan dolphin catch, Pelzer was quick to assert his innocence. "We were not involved at all," he told me. "Only afterwards, when the dolphins arrived, did we give Mr Lienhardt the possibility of storing them in our place." Pelzer went on: "We never had our own dolphins. We used to rent the whole show as a package from Lienhardt, Walter Moser or René Duss." Asked how many dolphins arrived at Safariland from Taiwan, Pelzer replied, "in all about 20 for sure. To my knowledge not one is alive today."

The Scientific Loophole

According to Moses, the Taiwan operation was arranged so that the authorities would assume that the dolphins were to be used purely for scientific purposes, a ploy that perhaps portends an inauspicious fate for EEC regulations which stipulate that dolphins may only be imported for educational or scientific purposes. A more ominous development, however, would be a kind of marriage of convenience between unscrupulous traders and scientists to obtain dolphins, a precedent set by the Taiwan operation.

When I attempted to obtain further information on the Taiwan massacre from the IDS, Heidi Bader responded by saying that the operation "was not arranged by Mr Lienhardt but by a professor in Paris who wanted the dolphins for scientific research." Bruno Lienhardt himself was not prepared to comment on the issue. Reached by telephone, Prof. René Guy Busnel's first reaction was to claim that he was "only giving advice" to Lienhardt for the dolphin catch. Upon further questioning however, he admitted that he was attempting to obtain dolphins for scientific research but said that he had received no dolphins from Taiwan "because they all died, I don't know how many." And in what seems to be a strange warp of scientific logic, Prof. Busnel declared that the dolphins "died because of polluted water in Makung harbour, not because of capture". Although admitting that capture necessitated the animals being stored in holding pens in the harbour, the professor insisted that "you can't capture and transport dolphins immediately because first they must be kept in these pens to domesticate them." He therefore concluded that the death of so many dolphins "is quite normal." When questioned as to whether he was aware that Lienhardt was using his name for official purposes so that the export and import of the dolphins would be categorised as being for "scientific purposes" even though they were actually destined for a number of amusement parks in Europe, Busnel replied testily that "you know nothing about this subject. Everywhere, in the USA, South Africa, Singapore, Europe, dolphinariums are engaged in valid and valuable scientific research."

NATO and the US Navy

Asked what kind of research his 20 Taiwan dolphins were to have been used for, Busnel replied: "For sonar research. I have been working for 25 years on this subject at the Institute in Paris and at the dolphinarium and research station in Antibes. NATO funded our experiments in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and we also worked in the USA and Denmark." Rather vaguely, Busnel recalls that during those years "about ten dolphins every year" were used for scientific research. When asked if this included terminal vivisection experiments, Busnel rapidly terminated the interview.

According to a spokesperson at NATO's scientific section in Brussels, Prof. Busnel "was awarded a research grant by NATO's Scientific Committee in 1979," and "such research grants are usually in the region of one million Belgian francs." The grant was for "an advanced research workshop" which in 1980, resulted a 1000 page tome entitled Animal Sonar Systems, co-edited by Busnel and published as part of NATO's Advanced Science Institute series by Plenum Press.

In addition to his association with NATO, Busnel and his colleagues also worked closely with the US Navy's Marine Mammal Program, based at the Naval Missile Center and Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, California. The Marine Mammal Program is devoted to the military application of dolphin research and has even trained dolphins as "living torpedoes" to attack enemy divers. In this day and age of increased sensibilities over animal welfare, the 1987 Pentagon budget authorised "the taking of not more than 25 marine mammals each year for national defense purposes." But it is difficult to tell whether the capture of more dolphins, whales and seals could be hidden in highly-classified military budgets. The Advanced Marine Biological Systems Project (AMBS), which administers the exploitation of marine mammals in the US Navy, was allocated 5.4 million dollars in 1986 - and this only for the unclassified section of the budget, the tip of the iceberg.

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