Liam Bartlett: Dolphin Cove

For pure entertainment value, it was wedged somewhere between Gilligan’s Island and Get Smart.

But the physical feats and mental gymnastics of the star made Skippy look like a badly stuffed pyjama holder.

It boggled my mind then to be sitting on a Bullet train in Japan, decades later, alongside the man responsible for making Flipper a worldwide phenomenon.

Ric O’Barry helped capture and train the dolphin, or should I say dolphins, that made the show possible.

There were five in all and in true Hollywood style, the ‘star’ had the off-screen name of ‘Cathy’.

Yep, so much for the theme song; “They call him Flipper”... Ric is convinced that Cathy decided to stop breathing – essentially committing suicide – because of depression caused by captivity. When she died, literally in his arms, he made a vow to dedicate his life to releasing every dolphin he could find around the world and 39 years later, his holy grail is the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.

His incredibly audacious attempts to stop the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins as well as a sizeable trade in live captures has lead to the production of an activist documentary called “The Cove”. Thanks to more than $5million in funding from computer mogul Jim Clarke, the American husband of Aussie model Kristy Hinze, the movie is very effective in showing the gruesomeness of what is happening every year in this otherwise beautiful place.

Ric told me that, in truth, the doco had no fixed budget when they started out some five years ago. Clarke had simply instructed the director Louie Psihoyos to “just make a difference” and kept putting his money where his mouth was until it was finished.

It’s early days yet in the films release schedule but already it is beginning to cause large headaches for Japanese authorities.

And that’s another reason Ric invited us to go back to Taiji with him. He reasoned that safety in numbers and a camera crew would offer some degree of protection against the fishermen and local officials who are clearly not happy with having their annual horror show exposed to the world.

Indeed, when we arrived, the fishermen had shut up shop and refused to send out any boats in an effort to deny us any filming opportunities.

It was a pointless protest however as Ric had already offered our team complete access to all of their footage so that 60 Minutes viewers would be certain to see what is really happening.

From what we witnessed, one thing that is certain is that, by Western standards, Taiji is a strange place to a visit.

It’s a town that celebrates whaling with a large museum and aquarium where you can buy whale burgers and dolphin meat while watching them perform.

Pilot whales, dolphins and a large Orca are kept in tiny tanks in this ‘sea park’ which also features many tourist displays that preach conservation.

Less than a hundred metres away, around a small headland, is the killing cove and another hundred further on is the local council offices where the mayor runs the whole shebang.

Everything is within a five minute walk, including the holding pens for the ‘better quality’ dolphins that are picked for export. And at US$154,000 each, in a recent contract with the Dominican Republic, its little wonder that Ric has become public enemy number one in the Japanese village.

With huge potential profits on the line, it’s also not surprising that Ric admitted to me he is more fearful of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, than the fishermen of Taiji.

For their part, the fishermen refuse to make their reasons for the slaughter public.

Privately they argue that it is part of their cultural way of life, although it’s hard to consider it traditional given that they only started the mass killings in the 1930’s.

The point that is harder to counter is their charge that we are hypocritical considering we are happy to kill Kangaroos, also by the thousands. When it comes down to it, perhaps Skippy and Flipper have more in common that I thought.

Whatever side you take, spare some time to have a look at “The Cove” and make up your own mind.