It’s easy to get cynical about a documentary’s power to effectuate change in the world, what with Sicko’s unsuccessful bid to fix our health care and Helvetica’s sad failure to kill off Comic Sans. But the good news today is that one might have actually worked! Following the modest art-house success of this summer’s The Cove — in which director Louie Psihoyos and activist Richard O’Barry exposed the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins in a Japanese lagoon — the killing seems to have stopped, for now. When O’Barry arrived in Taiji on Monday for the first day of slaughter season, as he does every year, he found an army of Japanese TV crews (who’d ignored the story in previous years) and no dolphin-killing fishermen.
Writes Barry at Take Part:
“Yes, today was a good day for dolphins … Tomorrow, too, I predict will be a good day for dolphins. Every day that we are here and the fishermen KNOW we are here, will likely mean no boats going out to round up dolphins for the killing Cove. And because of The Cove movie, the dolphin killers must now fear hidden cameras and microphones, even when they THINK we are not here.”
It’s nice when these things work out.
A Good Day for Dolphins [Take Part via PopWatch/EW]
Earlier: The Cove’s Richard O’Barry on Secret Dolphin Slaughter — and Flipper’s Suicide
The Legacy of Flipper [NYM]
