![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/the-cove-250x169.jpg\" "\\"the-cove\\"")
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For most people of a certain age, our image of the cheerful, helpful and super intelligent bottlenose\u00a0dolphin was formed by the iconic 1960s Flipper television series – a marine version of Lassie.<\/p>\n
The show portrayed a wild dolphin who acted as a sidekick to a Florida marine park warden and his two\u00a0young sons. Produced in cooperation with the Miami Seaquarium, all the TV dolphins were captured\u00a0and trained by an ex-navy diver named Ric O\u2019Barry.<\/p>\n
But Flipper also ended up changing O\u2019Barry’s life. In 1970, he made an about-face and began educating\u00a0the public on the plight of captive dolphins, spending some time in the Bimini jail for trying to release a\u00a0dolphin held at Alice Town’s now-defunct Lerner Marine Lab. For the last 40-plus years he has spoken\u00a0out against dolphin capture at lectures and conferences around the world. In fact, he gave a talk in\u00a0Nassau a few months ago.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Barry eventually hooked up with an activist group called the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society –\u00a0founded in the 1970s by a former Greenpeace leader named Paul Watson. This group\u2019s mission was “to\u00a0intervene against illegal activities exploiting marine wildlife.\u201d Sea Shepherd is known for its dramatic\u00a0encounters with Japanese whaling ships in the Antarctic. And more recently it has helped expose the\u00a0large-scale hunting of small cetaceans in Japanese coastal waters.<\/p>\n
The annual slaughter of small cetaceans off Japan was virtually unknown until 2003, when O\u2019Barry and\u00a0a Sea Shepherd team were arrested for cutting nets to release dolphins captured in a drive hunt at the\u00a0small port of Taiji in Japan. Their covertly obtained photos of the killing of hundreds of small whales\u00a0and dolphins in a hidden cove made headlines around the world, causing the fishermen to erect\u00a0barricades to hide the bloody slaughter from prying cameras.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Barry returned to Taiji every year to help end the drive hunts. A big turning point came in 2009, when\u00a0he partnered with a Greek-American photographer and director named Louie Psihoyos. The result of\u00a0this partnership was a powerful film which argued that the drive hunts are cruel, unnecessary and\u00a0unsustainable. The Cove won worldwide acclaim and an Academy Award for best documentary feature.<\/p>\n
So scores of earnest volunteers from around the world, styling themselves Cove Guardians, descend on\u00a0Taiji every year. They spend two weeks at a time during the killing season, monitoring and documenting\u00a0the entire hunt. And this year, two of those volunteers made their way from the Bahamas. Sheri Albury-Hubball and Melissa Maura are close friends and animal welfare advocates who became passionate\u00a0about the drive hunts after watching The Cove three years ago.<\/p>\n