Dauphins nés captifs : le massacre des innocents !

Références

Captive Cetaceans: A Handbook for Campaigners

Review of the Scientific Justifications for Maintaining Cetaceans in captivity

Born Captive
http://www.iridescent-publishing.com/rtm/ch4p1.htm

As for the last of the law's three great alibis, the "art of cetacean husbandry" - the absence of which John L. Adams lamented way back in 1972 - it is scarcely nearer to realisation than ever before. Indeed, it has never been a feasible proposition for most oceanaria simply because of cost. As long ago as 1977, a report by specialists concluded that producing second generation captive dolphins would cost over $1 million with a starting colony of one male and twelve females.

Even the majority of the wealthier oceanaria in the USA and Japan have paid little more than lip service to captive breeding, partly because of their overeagerness to exchange the circus image for the more respectable scientific and educational credibility of the marine zoo. With typically uninspired leadership, instead of creating viable breeding colonies of a single species, and optimising their facilities to go some way towards meeting the animals' social needs, they set about mimicking the long outmoded menagerie collections of early 20th century, emphasising the size and range of the animal collection, and fleshing-out the cetacean exhibits with seals, sea-lions and penguins.

Japan has experimented with Gill's bottlenose and Risso's dolphin, while South Africa has kept the Indian Ocean bottlenose and the Dusky dolphin. With pioneering spirit, the USA has displayed the Amazon river dolphin, the Commerson dolphin, the Pacific white-sided dolphin as well as beluga whales, pilot whales, and the common dolphin.

While Pilleri cites a 90% death rate of young at pregnancy, proponents of the industry claim that as standards have improved so have the survival figures for newborn dolphins. That may be true in the USA but elsewhere around the world, the statistics continue to be bleak. The first known captive birth - to a harbour porpoise "rescued" from a fishing net - took place in 1914 at Brighton Aquarium. The calf - conceived in the wild as so many captive births continue to be to this very day - died immediately. That inauspicious event was to herald a veritable epidemic of miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths in the world's dolphinaria, plagued both by the behavioural problems of the animals themselves, and the incompetence or inexperience of staff. Thus, according to the International Zoo Yearbook, from 1965 to 1986, 134 dolphins of various species were born in captivity around the world, of which 106 died.

Sometimes, the temptation to deceive the public with a 'phantom' pregnancy is irresistible, a fact attested to by Dr Margaret Klinowska in her government-commissioned report, A Review of Dolphinaria: "....'pregnancy' sometimes covered other reasons for failure to perform," she notes sardonically, "for example: required elsewhere, incompatibility, illness or death." But Professor Paul Schauenberger remains unimpressed by such criticisms. Up to the present day, he claims, approximately 180 dolphins have been born in captivity, and survival rates have improved so dramatically that the foremost dolphinaria in the USA are gradually reaching self-sufficiency. That may be good news for the wild dolphin as a species, but again, it does little for the long-term welfare of the individual animal. Indeed, one of the inherent dangers of captive breeding success is that commercial dealing in the animals would no longer be subject to international conventions governing the trade in endangered species. These have at least shown some appreciable results in curtailing the more obvious abuses of the dolphin dealing industry. With inexplicable logic, the captive-bred individual is deprived of what few rights were afforded to its wild-caught mother as soon as it is born. With second generation animals now growing up into adulthood - neither they nor their parents ever having known the sea or ocean - it seems as though these animals, if the industry has its way, will notonly be stripped of their true identity, but eventually will have no more rights than a battery chicken or a pig on an industrial farm.

Major advances in husbandry and breeding success, concludes Schauenberger - albeit with an embarrassing dearth of evidence - heralds a promising future for the industry. In much the same way that the cat, dog, pig, sheep and goat were domesticated thousands of years ago, so today, the wild dolphin is being tamed and domesticated by homo sapiens. Declares the visionary professor: "There is no convincing and justifiable reason at all to stop experiments to tame new species. . . At some time in the future there will be farms in the sea where man will increasingly breed fish for his own consumption. Then the dolphins will play a major role. They will, if we wish it to be so, be the sheepdogs of the seas!"

Even discounting such lurid fantasies, appearances that the industry is in a state of decline at present may well be deceptive. It would probably be truer to say that after several years of being under intense siege, it is now quietly plotting its future course of action, confident that it has been able to contend with EEC Council Regulation 3626/82, with a mixture of bluff, feigned respectability, and political connections. No doubt the industry expects to be able to weather the storm of more rigorous animal welfare legislation in the same way. Some dolphinaria might go to the wall, but that is just one of the decrees of fate in a cut-throat business; the industry as a whole will survive, though not without ruthless strategy.

Part of that strategy has been aimed at dismantling Regulation 3626/82.
Behind the scenes, the European dolphin industry remonstrated, lobbied, and cajoled every influential person they could think of to convince the authorities that the regulation was suffocating them, preventing "reputable" dolphinaria from mounting breeding and scientific research programmes, and discouraging even the less reputable ones from investing in new installations.

Pressure to de-list the dolphins from Annex C1 to Annex C2 was first detected from the Netherlands - which was then also home to the dolphin industry's lobbying organisation, the EAAM - and Britain, home of EAAM President, David Taylor. It was thus that on 7 April 1987, Dr B. M. Lensink, vice-chair of the Netherlands CITES/EEC Scientific Authority, wrote to Claus Stuffmann of the European Commission, declaring that because fifteen species of cetacean - with the bottlenose dolphin and orca whale inexplicably heading his list - "cannot be considered as threatened with extinction" the Netherlands Scientific Authority proposed to relegate them to Annex C2.

A similar confidential proposal, "adapted from a text by Dr Margaret Klinowska" was submitted in August 1988 by the UK CITES Scientific Authority. Later that year, the influential EEC-CITES Scientific Working Group decided to recommend to the Council of Ministers the relegation of the cetacean species along the lines proposed by Lensink.

Given the current wave of public sympathy for the plight of captive dolphins, particularly in the UK, it is not surprising that such behind-the-scenes manoeuvring has been conducted with the utmost subterfuge.
The move would again render the dolphins virtually unprotected from the brutality and ruthlessness of the trade. As Appendix II animals, not even the feeble legal requirement of 'education' would stand in the way. Says Pier Lorenzo Florio, director of the Italian branch of TRAFFIC: "We have our hands full even now checking-up on the legitimacy of the industry and its respect or otherwise for animal welfare. Should this measure go through, it will open the flood-gates, and we won't have any legal means to stop it."

Born Captive http://www.iridescent-publishing.com/rtm/ch4p1.htm

Born Captive
http://www.iridescent-publishing.com/rtm/ch4p1.htm