The Cove and Dolphin Sentience

 The slaughter Ric O'Barry and his crew capture on film becomes the climax of The Cove, serving as the strongest animal rights argument in the film. Before all cameras have been planted in the hidden cove, from a distance the team films a dolphin trying to get away, leaving a trail of blood in the water in its wake. After the team plants the audio equipment, they listen to the dolphins scream in the cove. The sounds demonstrate that each dolphin is aware of its coming death. They anticipate their own slaughter, O’Barry explains. 

But it is after cameras are planted that the most shocking evidence against such slaughter is revealed. Ric and the team watch monitors showing fishermen on shore around a fire telling stories about whaling missions around the globe. Other shots show fishermen standing in boats and placing barriers across the cove. The fishermen herd in dolphins, disorienting them with constant tapping noises. Once they herd in the dolphins, fishermen begin the slaughter, stabbing dolphins repeatedly with harpoons. The water turns red with blood. Dolphin screams fill the soundtrack. The harpooning continues until all the dolphins are dead. The water is ruby red, but dolphins caught in nets are pierced again and again. They try to escape but are caught in this cove fortress. Carcasses are ripped on board the boats, but fishermen smoke nonchalantly, even diving into the bloody water in search of more bodies. The dolphins are dragged like harpooned whales. These images contrast with majestic shots of dolphins swimming freely in the sea. 

 The footage of the slaughter becomes O’Barry’s proof of dolphins’ sentience. Their suffering is clear on the video screen he shows a town spokesman and the members of the International Whaling Commission. And these shocking images get results. Small countries paid off by the Japanese leave the IWC, and dolphin meat is no longer allowed in school lunches, for example. By building an argument that first demonstrates dolphins’ equality because they, like humans, are both sentient and self-aware, The Cove draws on animal rights arguments. It also effectively takes that argument one-step further. Because dolphins are sentient and self-aware, their slaughter must end.

The Cove and Logical Reasoning

 

The Cove asserts both logical and emotional reasons why the dolphins should be saved. For example, the film provides practical reasons why humans should avoid dolphin meat, if they value their health, explaining that dolphin meat has toxic levels of mercury; yet, it is donated to area schools for lunch programs and disguised as whale meat in Tokyo markets. 

A history of problems with mercury poisoning is shown to support this claim, especially those recounting mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan in 1956, where the government covered up toxicity levels caused by industrial dumping. Fetuses were most affected, so children were born deformed, losing sight and hearing. Dolphins’ connection with humans is also used as a reason to stop the dolphins' slaughter. 

As perhaps the most intelligent sea creature, dolphins have been known to protect humans, are self-aware, and have the ability to learn language, skills only intelligent creatures can achieve.

The Cove as Rhetorical Documentary: Part I

 

The Cove establishes the worth of dolphins but also assumes, because they have historically been viewed as sentient creatures, that viewers will immediately call for action, once the slaughter at Taiji Cove is revealed. “We tried to do the story legally,” we’re told at the opening of this documentary revealing this dolphin slaughter in a cove in Taiji, Japan, “A little town with a really big secret.” 

Ric O’Barry’s attempts to film the slaughter are continually hampered by local authorities until he partners with the film’s director Louie Psihoyos. O’Barry never planned to be an activist, he explains, but after one of the dolphins he had trained killed herself in his arms by cutting off her own oxygen supply, he became a dolphin advocate, freeing as many as possible and preventing their slaughter. But dolphins are such great performers they have become a huge commodity worth $150,000.00 apiece for Sea World shows. Because thousands of dolphins come to Taiji each year, dolphin trainers collect dolphins there, bringing 2.3 million dollars a year to the area. The remaining dolphins herded into the cove are slaughtered for food, O’Barry explains, but he needs filmic proof to present to the world, so he can stop the catastrophe. 

Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and Netscape CEO Jim Clark join forces with O’Barry to accomplish this mission, helping him build a team of experts to plant cameras and microphones, even hiring George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic to construct artificial rocks in which they can hide cameras in the cove. They bring in world-class divers, a military expert, and a rock concert organizer to facilitate the mission, and the film documents the process these experts follow to plan and execute their goal to film the slaughter in two stages: they first plant audio equipment, and then, in Mission 2: The Full Orchestra, the team hides cameras around the cove.

ASLE Conference 2021

 

Dolphins and Sentience in The Cove

 

The Cove demonstrates dolphins’ connections with humans first through Ric O’Barry’s recollections of interactions with the dolphins he captured and trained for the television series, Flipper (1964-1968). According to O’Barry, he captured and trained the five female dolphins that played Flipper in the television series, translating the script into dolphin action each day. The dolphins’ skills and intellect surprised and impressed even O’Barry. They even recognized themselves in the show, when they saw themselves on O’Barry’s television. O’Barry lived in the house at the end of a dock featured in the series, so he came in contact with the dolphins almost every waking hour. When the show ended, however, the dolphins were sold to an aquarium where they entertained crowds, seemingly smiling throughout the show, “nature’s greatest deception,” according to O’Barry. 

This connection with humans unfortunately leads to their harm or even death. According to O’Barry, the aquarium life is so stressful for dolphins, they must take Maalox and Tagamet every day. They travel forty miles a day in the wild. Captivity not only confines them, but also interferes with their sonar. O’Barry explains, “When they are captured and put in a concrete tank surrounded by screaming people, the noise causes stress.” The sound of the filtration system was found to kill dolphins and had to be modified. O’Barry’s commentary demonstrates both their sentience—ability both to feel pleasure and pain—and their self-awareness—ability to recognize themselves on television, arguing effectively that dolphins should be preserved because destroying them means destroying persons of equal value to humans. 

The Cove also valorizes dolphin’s intelligence as a connection to humans through information provided by Dr. John Potter, who measures intelligence in dolphins. Dolphins respond to signals in American Sign Language, but they also connect with humans on an emotional level. According to Mandy-Rae Cruikshank, one of the divers in the film, a dolphin swam with her and invited her to rub its belly. Surfers recount stories of dolphins saving them from shark attacks. According to the film, then, dolphins have worth, so they deserve to live. They also deserve the freedom all persons of equal worth deserve.

The Cove Documentary and Animals Rights

 

The Cove and Animals Rights 

The Cove has received nearly universal acclaim, earning a 2009 Academy Award for best Documentary Feature film, perhaps because it is, according to Andrew O’Hehir, “a grim tale of murdered dolphins and poisoned school kids” that spins into “an amazing, real-life spy story video.” O’Hehir asserts, for example, that the film “raises troubling questions about how badly we have befouled the 70 percent of our planet that’s covered with water, and about why we have treated the species closest to us in intelligence with such cruelty and contempt.” Justin Chang declares, “Eco-activist documentaries don’t get much more compelling than The Cove, an impassioned piece of advocacy filmmaking that follows Flipper trainer-turned-marine crusader Richard O’Barry in his efforts to end dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan.” According to Chang, “it’s hard not to feel that there’s something uniquely barbaric about the destruction of this exceptionally intelligent, human-friendly species. Even Noel Murray, who calls the film “muddled” suggests that “The Cove offers a lot to think about in terms of the future of fishing, and Psihoyos’ gift for fiction-feature conventions does make a seemingly unpalatable subject entertaining.” 

Murray’s critique of the film, however, like other reviewers’ accolades, rests on its reliance on the point of view of dolphin advocate, Ric O’Barry, who, as Murray suggests, sides with “anyone who wants to protect dolphins, whether they want to shutter Sea World or not.” The Cove, then, is both praised and condemned because it valorizes an animal rights ethic. Animal rights ethicists like Peter Singer first argue that dolphins as a species deserve the same liberation movements as do human groups. As Singer argues, the film suggests that speciesism should be eradicated, just as racism and sexism should be abolished, primarily because animals are so much like humans. 

To support his claim, Singer asserts that humans are only considered morally superior because they belong to the species Homo sapiens. Singer also suggests that using this membership to define superiority is completely arbitrary. Instead, then, we should consider sentience—the capacity of a being to experience pleasure and pain—as a plausible criterion of moral importance. If we use sentience as a criterion, we extend to other sentient creatures the same basic moral consideration, the basic principle of equality. Therefore, we ought to extend to animals the same equality of consideration that we extend to human beings. Singer, like O’Barry, also connects selected animals more closely with humans, defining them as persons, a category that includes both sentience and self-awareness over time. In The Cove, O’Barry defines dolphins as both sentient and self-aware, offering these characteristics of persons as reasons for ensuring their safety and freedom.

Darwin's Nightmare and Lake Victoria's Struggle

 

Despite the European Union’s claim that Nile Perch from Lake Victoria have not been allowed in EU market countries since 1999, the exporting continues, according to Darwin's Nightmare, leaving a Syrian factory owner free to play with a mechanical dancing fish while the UN discusses a food shortage in Tanzania on a television news program and starving children fight for food. As Noel Murray suggests, “only a movie could catch the irony and horror of an office manager proudly showing off his Billy Bass while local children beat each other senseless over handfuls of rancid rice.” 

At the end of the film, Tanzanians rally and pray for food while watching a film about Jesus as a fisherman. Factory workers pack fish in boxes and onto cargo planes, leaving only bones and fish heads for the locals. Eliza is killed, leaving her friends to mourn, and a one legged-boy walks down empty railroad tracks while a man reads a BBC Focus on Africa magazine claiming there are no supplies for Tanzania. It would be a good idea for his son to be a pilot, he explains, so he can bring back supplies from Europe. Boys in the street smoke glue from empty soda bottles and sleep, and another plane takes off in a storm with thunder in the background. A Tanzanian woman watches from the ground. 

Director Hubert Sauper used a minimalist unit to shoot Darwin’s Nightmare, relying only on himself, his camera, and his companion, Sandor to document the figures he followed throughout the film. Although Sauper and Sandor faced obstacles when shooting the film, including multiple arrests that required bribes to earn their freedom, Sauper found effective footage to make his point. According to Sauper, “When you look out for contrasts and contradictions, reality can become ‘bigger than life.’ So in a way it was easy to find striking images because I was filming a striking reality,” a reality that demonstrates the need for an interdependent biotic community. 

Even though Sauper argues that Tanzania’s dilemma is a product of evolution, we assert that Darwin’s Nightmare shows us what happens when the biotic communities of and between nonhuman and human nature are disturbed. Here, unlike The Cove, the film argues that a single species—either the Nile perch or the European colonizer—can destroy its environment and even itself. Instead of arguing for animal liberation, the film upholds the need for interdependent community. 

The consequences of such destruction are monumental and ultimately end in both lake and land turning into barren sinkholes. But the film stands only as a warning against disrupting other biospheres. It is too late for Lake Victoria and, perhaps, for Tanzania, the film suggests. Both Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line, then, demonstrate that arguments against over fishing that are based in organismic ecology may or may not change behaviors. Documentaries with animal rights-driven arguments, however, may produce real change.