I do want to say that we try to do the story legally.
Shit.
I thought of all the possibilities of what could happen,
and it kept me up at night.
The story that Ric showed me at the beginning
was just the tip of the iceberg.
Here it is... the town of Taiji.
The little town with a really big secret.
It's funny driving into Taiji.
It's kind of like The Twilight Zone.
It's so bizarre
because if you didn't know what's going on over here,
you would think this is a town that loved dolphins and whales.
On our left here is the infamous Taiji Whale Museum.
And I really, really hate this place.
When we first got to Japan,
Ric O'Barry was incredibly frustrated.
He said, "Oh, you have to wear a mask.
Otherwise, they'll know that we're here."
And I thought, okay, all right.
There's the police.
I've got to hunch over and change my shape
so they think I'm just some old Japanese guy.
I thought, you know, what am I doing?
I went halfway across the world to end up in this car,
locked up with this paranoid guy.
Somebody's behind me.
I don't know who that is.
Yep. He's coming. He's coming.
Is he really?
Yeah. I've been doing this too long.
The mayor of this town actually gave me the key to the city.
I was welcome then.
Today they'd kill me if they could.
And I'm not exaggerating.
If these fishermen could catch me and kill me,
they would.
About three years ago,
my friend Jim Clark and I started this organization...
The Oceanic Preservation Society, OPS.
We've been diving for over 35 years,
and you could go back to the same dive spot year after year
and literally see the degradation of the oceans
before your very eyes.
There's major extinctions going on right now in our lifetime.
Jim had the idea
to try to do something about it, to stop this,
so I began documenting reefs around the world.
I went to a marine mammal conference down in San Diego.
There was 2,000 of the world's top marine mammal scientists,
and Ric O'Barry was supposed to be the keynote speaker,
and at the last minute,
the sponsor of the program pulled him from the ticket.
I thought, oh God, that's interesting.
Well, who's the sponsor?
They said, "Sea World."
A lot of marine mammal scientists get their money
from Hub Research Institute,
which is the nonprofit arm of Sea World.
They don't like me.
They don't like my message about captivity,
and they took me off the list.
They wouldn't let me talk about this dolphin slaughter in Taiji.
I said, "Dolphin slaughter? What's... What's that about?"
He says, "Well, I'm going next week.
You want to come?"
Now we're approaching the area that's most important.
That's a dolphin's worst nightmare right there.
Hundreds of thousands of dolphins have died there.
You'll see the signs... "Keep Out," "Danger."
There are fishermen walking around these hills with knives.
This is a national park.
The fishermen told me.
They said, "If the world finds out what goes on here,
we'll be shut down."
Can you imagine that?
They actually told us that.
We knew to get in there and film exactly what happens.
We need to know the truth.
When we got back to the hotel...
It's a big spa hotel,
people going by in robes,
and there's these three undercover cops talking to Ric.
No.
- No. - No?
No.
In the background,
you could see these dolphin boats going by in the window,
and it was just... it was so surreal.
I couldn't... I wanted to laugh,
and I wanted to scream at the same time.
No. No.
Right. I know.
Yeah.
I don't enter. No, no.
Thank you so much, and...
You're welcome.
- See you again. - Okay. Bye-bye.
I never planned on being an activist.
One thing leads to another,
and now if there's a dolphin in trouble
anywhere in the world,
my phone will ring.
Ric is world famous for his work with dolphins.
The first time I connected with him in recent years
was on a trip down to Nicaragua.
There were two dolphins
in a swimming pool filled with their own excrement.
Ric somehow enlisted the military forces of Nicaragua.
The dolphins were put on a helicopter,
and then out to sea we go,
and the dolphins are released.
We're going to capture these dolphins out of the wild
and bring them into captivity.
There are people who will set them free.
In March of this year,
O'Barry was arrested three times in Florida
for trying to free some captive dolphins.
On Earth Day, he was arrested for the same thing
on the Island of Bimini.
How many times have you been arrested?
This year?
Swimmer, you're within a government-authorized test area.
You are holding up a government project.
Do you understand?
God damn it.
A dolphin in the right spot can make a million dollars a year.
There's a lot of money in it.
If you get in their way...
and I get in their way...
it can be very, very dangerous.
Jane Tipson, she was murdered.
She's the second colleague I've worked with that was murdered.
The other one was Jenny May.
We were trying to stop the traffic in Russian dolphins,
and it involved a hunger strike.
About the tenth day, I passed out,
and I went to a hospital there,
so Jenny became a target,
and they followed her down the beach
and strangled her with her own belt.
These dolphins are symbolic of a new day for the environment.
It's all about respect now, not exploitation.
I feel somewhat responsible
because it was the Flipper TV series
that created this multi-billion-dollar industry.
It created this desire to swim with them and kiss them
and hold them and hug them and love them to death,
and it created all these captures.
There were five female dolphins
who collectively played the part of Flipper.
I captured the five dolphins myself.
The entire crew turns to with battle station teamwork.
When the porpoise is sighted,
not a moment can be lost.
The men handle this creature with infinite care.
She seems to sense that she has come home,
that no harm will come to her now.
She is safe.
When I started training dolphins, there was no manual.
I would get the script,
and it says "Flipper goes over to the dock "and picks up the gun
and then swims down left to right."
I had to actually translate that into action somehow.
Thanks, Flipper.
Yeah. Thanks, Flipper.
The thing that really struck me
was that they're smarter than we think they are.
The house that you see on the Flipper set
where the family lives
was actually my house.
I lived there all year round for seven years.
And right in front of the house
there was a lake, salt water lake,
and that's where Flipper was at the end of the dock.
When Flipper came on television at Friday night at 7:30,
I would take my television set from the house
and go down the end of the dock
with a long extension cord,
and Cathy would watch herself on television,
and she could tell the difference between herself and Suzy,
who was another Flipper dolphin that was used.
I knew then they were self-aware,
and when you become conscious of this nonhuman intelligence,
you realize after a while they don't really belong in captivity.
But I didn't do anything about it.
One day, it all ended.
Like the props, they went back to the Miami Seaquarium.
When you just walk into this place and the music is playing,
the dolphin is jumping and smiling,
it's hard to see the problem.
But a dolphin's smile is nature's greatest deception.
It creates the illusion they're always happy.
The nerve center of any dolphinarium is the fish house.
And if you go to any one of these fish houses,
you'll see bottles of Maalox and Tagamet.
And they're used because dolphins get ulcers,
because they're all stressed out.
You have to see them in the wild
to understand why captivity doesn't work.
In the wild, they're traveling 40 miles a day.
They could be surfing in one area in the morning,
and the next hour they could be 25 miles away
feeding or socializing.
Dolphins are acoustic creatures.
That's their primary sense.
The best sonar that man has
is a toy compared to the dolphins' sonar.
When you're in the water,
the dolphins can see right through you.
They can see your heart beating.
They can see your bones.
They can see if you're pregnant.
They get a lot of information with their sound.
The dolphin is captured and put in a concrete tank
surrounded by a stadium full of screaming people.
At the National Aquarium in Baltimore,
when it first opened, dolphins were dying left and right.
They couldn't keep dolphins alive,
and they finally figured out
it's because the filtration system was making a lot of noise.
It's the stress that kills them.
So they're very sensitive to sound.
That's their primary sense,
and that's their downfall in Taiji.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7...
There's 12 of them.
This is a classic drive,
what you're watching here.
There are migratory routes
that dolphins have been using for thousands of years,
and they just wait till the dolphins come by.
The boats then put these long poles in the water
which have a flange on the bottom,
and they just bang on these poles with hammers,
and they create a wall of sound which frightens the dolphins.
There were several hundred dolphins being driven ashore.
I'd never seen so many dolphins before,
and they were all running for their lives,
running from this wall of sound.
I think I can actually hear the banging,
but I hear it all the time.
I hear it in my sleep.
That sound never goes away once you hear it.
By the time they get to the lagoon,
they're totally freaked out, stressed out to the max.
They seal it, then they go home.
The next morning,
all of these dolphin trainers will be lined up
selecting the ones that they want for the dolphinariums.
They're looking for bottlenose dolphin, primarily.
They're looking for Flipper,
and so they collect young females,
just like we did for the Flipper show.
And they're flown to different parts of the world.
I could have my own dolphin facility somewhere in the Caribbean
and be making 2 or 3 million dollars a year
like these guys, if I wanted to.
But I walked away from that.
The thing that turned me around
was the death of Flipper, of Cathy.
She was really depressed. I could feel it.
I could see it.
And she committed suicide in my arms.
That's a very strong word, suicide.
But you have to understand
dolphins and other whales are not automatic air breathers,
like we are.
Every breath they take is a conscious effort.
And so they can end their life
whenever life becomes too unbearable
by not taking the next breath.
And it's in that context I use the word suicide.
She did that.
She swam into my arms
and looked me right in the eye
and... took a breath...
and didn't take another one.
I just let her go,
and she sank straight down on her belly to the bottom of the tank.
The next day, I was in the Bimini jail
for trying to free a dolphin at the Lerner Marine Laboratory.
That's how I reacted to it.
I was going to free every captive dolphin I could.
I spent ten years building that industry up.
And I spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down.
When I started out, there were only three dolphinariums.
Today it's become a multi-billion-dollar industry.
In all of these captures,
we helped create the largest slaughter of dolphins on the planet.
Anyone can watch the capture process go on from the road.
But Ric pointed out
where they take the boats around to the secret cove
that nobody could see where dolphins that weren't selected
are slaughtered and sold for their meat.
Here in Taiji,
you can go to the Whale Museum and watch the dolphin show
and eat a dolphin at the same time.
They sell dolphin and whale meat right in the dolphinarium.
It's the captivity industry that keeps this slaughter going
by rewarding the fishermen for their bad behavior.
They only get $600 for a dead dolphin,
but they can get more than $150,000 for a live show dolphin.
I told Ric that I'd help him out,
that we'll fix this, we'll change this.
And I didn't tell him how
because I really didn't know how we were going to do it.
There are lots of groups here in Japan...
World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace,
International Fund for Animal Welfare.
They all make hundreds of millions of dollars between them.
This is the largest slaughter of dolphins in the world.
Where are they?
There is one organization
whose sole purpose is to protect all cetaceans in the wild.
That's the IWC...
the International Whaling Commission.
But for some reason,
small cetaceans, dolphins and porpoises, aren't protected.
Dolphins are whales.
Size doesn't matter.
The IWC will go down in history as a ship of fools.
There's no... There's no democracy here
by any stretch of the imagination.
They do whatever the hell they want to do.
Mr. O'Barry, you know I'm here.
Yeah?
I have to ask you to leave the hotel.
You could have waited till morning, but...
Sir, I asked you very nicely to turn off your camera.
The reason why small cetaceans are not popular with the IWC
is because the whaling nations that set this thing up
clearly has the best interest in leaving those out,
particularly if they happen to be eating them.
Joji Marshita is the Deputy Commissioner for Whaling.
He's a talented guy from Japan with a real hard job to do.
He has to get up every day.
First he'll look at himself in the mirror,
and then he's got to go out
and explain to the world Japan's whaling policy.
Very complicated subject to get around.
It's clear the issue of whaling
is becoming more of emotions.
We have never had a convincing reason
why this species is so special.
The International Whaling Commission
is the only international body dealing with whales
that's officially recognized by the United Nations.
It's basically a toothless organization,
but it is the only organization that does exist.
Well, there's a clause
in the International Whaling Convention
that allows a nation to take whales for science,
and Japan has decided that that's its loophole.
Currently, Japan has research programs
that involve killing minke whales,
fin whales, sei whales, and humpback whales.
Every scientific catch, to me,
is a dark spot on the record of this commission.
They're talking about the 1,000 whales in the Antarctic.
They're not talking about
the 23,000 over here being slaughtered.
The IWC has presided
over one of the greatest
environmental catastrophes of all time.
The reality is the International Whaling Commission
does have a mandate
to look at issues affecting dolphins,
but the Japanese are trying to legitimize a practice
that just about every country in the world has said no to.
Governments are really great
at getting together and holding meetings
and conferences and glad-handing each other,
but they never ever seem to accomplish anything.
It's as Margaret Mead once said...
never ever depend upon governments or institutions
to solve any major problem.
All social change comes from the passion of individuals.
If saving cetacean species from extinction
relies upon the International Whaling Commission,
then there is no hope.
During the Greek era,
it was punishable by death to harm a dolphin.
They were protected,
and they were protected
because there's a lot of stories throughout history
of dolphins saving the lives of humans.
There's some real magic there when you're on a wave together.
There's this other species
that you can't consciously communicate with,
and you're both experiencing a thing
that's purely for joy
beyond the level of survival.
I went surfing on the east coast of Australia.
About half an hour into the session,
I was sitting with this friend of mine,
and he goes, "Wait,"
and on the surface of the next wave was a tiger shark.
Its fins were down, and it was in the zone.
This thing was literally 2 meters away from me,
and I look down, and right there...
it's like in a glass case in a wall...
this dolphin comes out of right field
and T-bones this shark
and pushes it directly away from me and my buddy.
In that moment...
That's the most obvious demonstration of the connection in my life.
A few years ago, a friend of mine told me
about what was going on in Japan.
23,000 are being wiped out every year,
and it's not even acknowledged.
Nobody has actually seen what takes place back there,
and so the way to stop it is to expose it.
They've already told us that...
"Don't take pictures."
The sign says "Don't take pictures."
And so the way to stop it is keep exposing this to the world.
Eventually, the Japanese government will say
"Look, this is not working. It's a PR nightmare."
No! No photograph.
I brought the BBC, The London Times,
Time Magazine,
and everybody goes away empty-handed.
No photos, okay?
They're afraid of cameras.
One morning I didn't have my camera,
and a couple guys from the boat,
they took a baby dolphin up and cut its throat.
It was already dead, but they held it up and cut its throat,
and they were just trying to get me angry,
and I almost hit this guy.
He got right in my face.
We called him Private Space.
That's the only two words he knows in English...
private space.
Private!
And he got right in my face,
and he's screaming at me with a camera.
He wanted me to hit him.
I mean, he just egged me on,
and I almost... man, I almost decked this guy
and knocked him off that rock.
That's what they want you to do...
hit them or do something to get you out of here.
The only way they can get us out of here
is get us arrested and get it on video.
I spend most of my time
trying to keep from getting arrested on bogus charges.
They spend most of their time
trying to arrest us on bogus charges
and get us out of the game.
In 2003, I sent a crew to Taiji.
Their objective was to just get evidence to film
and see what's going on there.
They got into the water and cut the nets
and released some pilot whales and dolphins
and were immediately arrested for that.
Come on!
That actually worked out
to show that we were determined
to protect the lives of these animals,
but of course it made it very difficult to return.
In 2007, when I wanted to do something
to expose the issue,
I was shocked
that I was the only surfer in my surfing community
that knew about this,
so Hayden Panettiere, Isabel Lucas,
we all connected, and we made the decision,
okay, we're going to paddle out.
No one's going to be aggressive.
And they got really fired up.
We had to pull the pin.
There was nothing we could do,
nothing more we could do in that scenario.
You see, this is like a cat and mouse game.
Those particular activists,
they were arrested right here in this very spot.
Now they can never come back.
They're out of the game.
My heart went out to them.
I watched Flipper as a child.
I grew to love the oceans partly because of Flipper.
We are going to stop this.
We're going to stop this.
And here's the guy that started it all.
He's trying to rectify this huge problem,
but he can't find anybody to help him.
If we could just get in there, we can stop this.
The first guy I called was my buddy Charles Hambleton.
He's a adrenaline junkie.
He's been sail master on The Pirates of the Caribbean.
He's traveled all over the world on photo assignments.
He's the guy that has a heart of gold
and nerves of steel. He'll do anything.
I remember distinctly a phone call
saying I needed to be in Japan.
We stepped off the train in Taiji,
and we were immediately met by Ric O'Barry,
along with the police.
I'm not entirely sure
Louis knew what he was getting himself into.
On our initial trip to Japan,
we had a formal meeting in the town mayor's office
with the fishing union
and with all the proper authorities.
We spent seven hours trying to negotiate an arrangement
where we would try to be respectful of their side.
That was the point to me, is get both sides.
And we started to realize that they were hiding something.
You have to get permission to get a permit
to get permission to do...
and nobody wants to do anything without permission.
After two days of negotiations,
they said, "We're not going to let you do it,"
and they put a map on the table
and pointed with these red X's on the map.
and said, "Don't go here, don't go here,
don't go here, don't go here."
And then Charles said...
"Could we just hang on to that for reference,
just so we know where we're not supposed to be?"
That kind of thing.
And that became sort of our template of where we had to go.
The secret cove is a natural fortress.
It's surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs.
There are several tunnels
that you need to get through to get there.
High fences surrounded by razor ribbon.
I've traveled all over the world throughout my entire life,
and the coastline is majestic.
It's astounding to think that this horror happens
in one of the most beautiful places.
We snuck up to this park.
It was called Tsunami Park.
It was blockaded, but we went up there.
The only safe time to go in Tsunami Park
is when there are no dolphins in the lagoon.
Then there are no guards around.
Ric pointed down to the secret lagoon,
and he said, "That's where all the dirty business happens."
The cops were on our tail,
and I thought, let's get out of here.
We'll try to regroup.
So we went off to do some sightseeing outside Taiji.
All these beautiful temples are there,
some of the most beautiful temples in all of Japan.
In one of these temples, they have a dry rock garden
where the monks rake these rocks,
and in the center they have these rocks
that people come from all over the world to contemplate.
It was gorgeous,
but I thought, in America,
people would never go on a Sunday to watch rocks.
Suddenly I got this idea.
What if the rocks looked back?
This was a big waterfall set
that we constructed for the movie Evan Almighty.
A dam breaks and floods
and takes the... washes the road out and...
One of my best friends and my first assistant
was a guy that became the head mold maker
at Industrial Light and Magic,
so I called up and said, "I've got this idea for a project.
"I want to hide Hi-Def cameras in a rock.
Can you help us?"
Is that what you had in mind?
It's a work of art, man.
We can do all of them brown if you want,
or we can do a combination of brown and gray.
I think brown and gray would be better.
I think this is going to be a primary for us
that these are all gray.
I would try to keep them
as lower of a profile as possible because...
We needed a special group of people
to implement this mission.
We needed people with a special set of skills.
I started to set up this team,
this... sort of this Ocean's Eleven team.
Simon Hutchins,
the only guy that had military experience.
Simon created all these weird ways
to hide Hi-Def cameras and hydrophones.
You know, he's a mad genius.
If we could dream it, Simon could build it.
Joe Chisolm organized rock concerts,
and we were kind of like a rock concert...
you know, incognito.
You know, we had hundreds of cases of material
that we had to import into Japan,
and he did the logistics.
Louis came back, and he said, "Look,
we got to get in,"
and Louis and I started discussing
all of the ways that we can film it.
We had a military grade thermal camera,
which you're not allowed to bring out of the country.
If it has a pulse, the thermal camera picks it up.
One thing that we had decided to do is get some aerial footage,
so we decided to take our own helicopter with us.
We looked into, you know, commandeering a satellite
to do satellite pictures.
We decided to make our own unmanned drone
with a gyro-stabilized Hi-Def camera below it.
We actually named it Cathy,
and that was purely out of respect for Ric O'Barry.
The idea there was
that even if the blimp didn't succeed and we got caught
that everybody loves a balloon...
you know, kids, police, everyone.
One of these devices that was very important to Louis and I
is the hydrophone... high tech sound devices
put in underwater housing.
I wanted to hear the dolphins from the lagoon,
but we didn't know how deep it was.
We had rebreathers,
but it would be clanky, it would be noisy.
Mandy-Rae Cruickshank and Kirk Krack
are world class freedivers.
Freediving in its simplest terms,
it's like deep snorkeling.
On one breath we see how deep we can go in the ocean,
how long we can hold our breath.
Mandy-Rae's owned
eight world championships in her lifetime.
She can go down to 300 feet on one breath of air
and come back on her own power.
They got on board pretty quickly
when they found out what we wanted to do.
We have some of the same physiological traits
that whales, seals, and dolphins have.
We're all air-breathing mammals.
They live in the water. We live on land.
When you're out swimming in the ocean
and you have whales and dolphins come by you,
it is one of the most incredible experiences ever.
It's so humbling that this wild creature
would come up and be so interested in you.
It's...
It's unbelievable, really.
Even though there's obviously no words spoken,
you really feel like you're on some level communicating with them,
like there's an understanding between the two of you.
I don't normally touch anything in the water,
but I just thought, you know,
it had been swimming with me for so long,
I put my hand out in front of me,
and it rolled right into my hand,
and it just stayed there in front of me,
letting me rub its belly.
Here you have this dolphin,
wild and on its own terms,
come up and really seek out affection and touch.
It really wanted to be with us.
When they asked us
if we wanted to partake in a secret ops mission
to uncover the dolphin slaughter,
we without hesitation said, "Absolutely. Sign us up.
What can we do?"
- This is what...
It's so cool.
Yeah.
I'm just a cute little innocent rock.
Getting these into Customs
is going to be the trick, I think, next.
I hope we'll be able to find them again
once we plant them.
Actually, come back to the hotel and we have real rocks.
There's 47 suitcases.
I don't think they're going to let us carry this on.
We definitely were trying to be as discreet as possible,
but there's nothing discreet about Westerners
in a place where there are no Westerners with big black cases,
and it was noted.
Well, now, there's a car here.
Just... I just got here yesterday.
You think... Do you think they know we're here?
You do?
First morning we arrived in Taiji,
Ric O'Barry met us at our hotel.
He decided that it would be a good idea
if he'd take us on a tour
so we got the lay of the land.
So we all get in the vehicles,
and one of the first things we noticed
was that we got an escort.
This is the butcher shop right here,
the slaughterhouse.
This is the union right here,
and there's Private Space.
When we first got in the country,
we had no idea who was following us.
There was about seven or eight cars that we had license plates,
so we knew that we were being followed by these people.
We didn't know if it was the whalers.
We didn't know if it was Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia.
We had no idea.
I'd met this guy that spoke English.
He was from the Whaling Museum,
and I asked him, "Do you know who's in that car over there?"
He looks over there, and he goes, "Chief of Police."
If you're around Ric, they... they know you're trouble.
Our first encounter with the fishermen
was they went down there at first break of light,
and as soon as we arrived,
a number of fishermen showed up.
We were down by the beach looking at...
You could see the blood coming out of the killing lagoon.
You could see a bunch of the babies
were cordoned off by themselves away from their parents
while their parents were all being slaughtered.
And so I wanted to get a better look into the lagoon,
and as Joe and I tried to walk down this path,
some of the fishermen came and actually butted chest against us.
Don't touch the girl.
Trying to stop us
from getting that vantage point on the killing.
And just after that,
We walked down to the water's edge,
and this one poor dolphin, it...
You could see it trying to get away,
and it was swimming straight for us and the shore,
and it actually made it over a couple of the nets,
and every time it came up for a breath,
you could see all this blood coming out behind it,
and you could see the last couple of breaths it took,
and then it went down, and we never saw it again.
Bye-bye-bye-bye.
It's a relatively small group of people who are doing this.
Outside these few remote villages,
most of the population doesn't even know this is going on.
The fishermen here who do this tell you "This is our tradition.
"This is our culture.
"You don't understand us.
You eat cows. Well, we eat dolphins."
Well, the truth is that's the big lie.
How can it be their culture, their tradition,
if the Japanese people don't even know about it?
23,000 dolphins are killed for meat every year.
You never heard of it?
People in Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo...
the reason they don't know about it
is because of a media cover-up,
a systematic, deliberate cover-up,
a media blackout,
because the dolphin meat is heavily laced with mercury.
Mercury starts in the environment
with the smallest of organisms,
and every step of the ladder up,
it gets magnified about ten times...
until the top of the food chain,
where you get these incredibly toxic levels.
All the fish that we love most to eat...
things like striped bass, bluefish,
tuna, swordfish, marlin...
this is a major source of mercury,
and these substances are causing real problems,
not just to dolphins, but to people,
because people and dolphins feed
at the same level of a food chain.
If you looked at bottlenose dolphins...
that's Flipper, by the way...
you'd discover, in fact,
these animals are swimming toxic dump sites.
It's better to refrain from taking those meats...
how do I say?
Too much.
But still dolphin meat contains some valuable nutrients.
This is a matter
that the consumer affairs and health ministries are looking after,
and I can assure you that there is no product on the market
that exceeds any of their standards.
By their standards.
Almost nobody eats dolphin meat,
but 23,000 are slaughtered every year,
so that begs the question,
Where is all this meat going?
Dolphin meat is generally considered to be a less desirable commodity,
and it would sell for far, far less if it was properly labeled.
So the meat is distributed much more widely than we recognize.
Scott Baker set up a portable DNA lab
at a hotel in downtown Tokyo.
We brought him samples, and he analyzed them
and found that a lot of the packages
that were labeled as expensive meat from larger whales
was actually dolphin meat.
A consumer may think they're buying healthy meat
from whales from the southern hemisphere,
and they might be getting a bottlenose dolphin
from the coast of Taiji
with levels of mercury that are 20 times higher
than World Health Organization recommendations.
The fishermen who are eating dolphin
are poisoning themselves,
but they're also poisoning
the people that they're selling it to.
And the government knows this,
and the government's covering this up.
They had this problem once before in Minamata.
That's where mercury poisoning was first discovered.
They called it Minamata disease.
Japan has a history of this terrible Minamata tragedy,
sometimes referred to as Minamata disease.
But it's not a disease. It's not caught.
It's the result of this toxicity.
The most serious health risk of these high levels of mercury
is to pregnant women.
It's the fetus that's most sensitive to these levels of mercury.
The children were starting to be born deformed.
And it's going to happen again.
Nobody has really looked into the hospitals,
looked into the records
to see how many people there have mercury poisoning.
The symptoms are memory loss,
loss of hearing, loss of your eyesight.
It doesn't just knock you over dead.
It takes a while.
And that's happening.
Does he want to know if he's poisoning the bodies
of other Japanese that he's selling the meat to?
He doesn't want to know.
He doesn't want to know about it.
Well, in Minamata, the government said
they weren't poisoning the people in Minamata, either.
Remember that?
The Chisso factory?
Same thing, same problem.
You don't think there's a cover-up going on
with the amount of mercury in dolphin meat?
I don't think that a similar tragedy would happen
because of the dolphin meat.
I don't think so.
Ultimately, the dolphin meat
is based on supply and demand like any other product,
and if that product is poison
and they can't sell it in Taiji,
then they can't sell it in Iwate,
and they can't sell it in Okinawa,
and they can't sell it wherever else they're selling it.
So you have to stay focused on that one lagoon in Taiji, I think,
in order to shut this down.
Howdy. How are you doing today?
If we got arrested, how long before they charged us?
They don't have to charge you with anything.
The way the law works in Japan,
they can keep you in jail with no charges for 28 days.
90% of the convictions in Japan
are obtained by confessions during those 28 days
because they can torture you legally.
They can wake you up in the middle of the night,
all night long, you know, and...
I've been doing that to them all week.
That may be aggressive...
Can we prosecute him?
I came to realize
that this was going to be a much longer process,
so we utilized our time over there doing reconnaissance, planning.
We observed.
There's two crews that went in last night...
the guys that come out of the tunnel.
They're sent to look on the left side.
They shine their flashlights. They go pretty quick
because they want to get to work and start out.
What they're doing is looking for little snap branches.
They normally go up there
when they have dolphins in the lagoon.
They go up and see if anybody's photographed them.
What I'm thinking is we go in there.
Maybe I use that location that has a branch,
and I cut the branch on a night when there's no dolphins.
There was two parts to the mission.
The first one was to get the auditory experience.
Where can we drop a big housing skull like this
with arms sticking out? Let's try getting that.
We could plant hydrophones on the side of the lagoon
that was easiest to get into.
It's a lot easier getting down the left side of the lagoon.
The right side is right in the center of the killing cove.
I go first with the thermal camera.
I can tell if there's any movement over there.
If they're hiding in the bushes,
they're going to be popping out.
So the hydrophone was sort of a trial run
to see if we could get away with it.
You guys go in with two cameras, right?
Three cameras.
The second mission,
what we call the full orchestra.
Let's go, then, with three cameras...
you're 2, you're 1...
and think about fourth.
We would plant all the rocks,
the hydrophones, underwater cameras.
They have scuba divers, so they just sweep.
They're straining the bottom of that bay,
so we don't want them to pick up underwater cameras.
Once you get right here, you're safe.
This is the first sign that says "Do not enter."
- We don't know what it says. - "Danger."
We have no idea.
It says "Welcome to Taiji" for all we know.
"Enjoy our wonderful UNESCO site."
I wanted to have a three-dimensional experience
with what's going on in that lagoon.
I wanted to hear everything that the dolphins were doing,
everything that the whalers were saying.
The effort wasn't just to show the slaughter.
You want to capture something that will make people change.
This weekend, the thin, mournful cry of the humpback whale
echoed through London's Trafalgar Square,
as thousands of demonstrators
demanded an end to all whale killing.
In the 1960s,
when the IWC wasn't doing anything
about the slaughter of large whales,
there was one guy, Roger Payne,
who helped start the whole Save the Whale movement
by exposing to the world
that these animals were singing.
That was profound.
What do we want?
Save the whales!
When do we want it?
Save the Whale demonstrators were out again today.
And they are determined to see that something be done about it.
At the time, about 33,000 whales a year were being killed.
We got it down eventually to about 330, 1% of that amount.
It's now going back up again.
There has to be a new generation that takes over from here.
There's only so many Ric O'Barrys and Roger Paynes.
They're all in their 60s and 70s now,
and there's not a lot of people out there
picking up where they've left off.
I like this.
It sinks very slowly, this line.
It does sink, but it's very slow,
so I just put a couple weights on it.
We're going to have these two hydrophones connected to it.
- One thing, though. - Yeah.
I took all the other stickers off, see?
Go on the...
"Please return dry."
Yeah, let's take the sticker off.
Okay? Jesus.
(03) 3224-5000.
That's the cell phone number for the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo
as well as the cell phone numbers of our other two phones,
just in case something shits the bed.
When we very discreetly leave the hotel room
with four or five guys dressed in black
with camera equipment,
we have it timed really well.
We know when the guard turns up.
We know how far the cop is going to be behind us.
We know how long it takes the cops
to get from the next village there.
It was probably the scariest night of my life
because we'd been up many days in a row
preparing for this.
We're exposed out there.
There's very few places we could hide.
Joe.
Here you go.
Come on. Let's go. Go.
Holy Christ.
Nice work.
Jesus.
100% of the people in the vehicle?
It's a good night.
That's a good night.
Me?
I don't know.
Not me.
At midnight, I'm sleeping.
I don't know.
I cannot speak for OPS.
I can only speak for Ric O'Barry.
I cannot speak for anybody except myself.
At midnight, I'm sleeping.
No, no, no.
I don't know.
I'm not OPS.
I'm not OPS, no.
Well, I do interviews.
Anybody who wants to talk to me,
- I will talk to them. - Yes?
OPS wants to talk to me, I talk to them.
I talk to anybody about mercury poisoning.
- Thank you. - Okay.
Thank you so much for your time.
- Bye-bye. - Bye-bye.
I think the most horrifying thing about the whole dive that night
was that, you know, you could hear them
communicating with each other,
and you knew that that next morning that would be the end of it.
They'd be silenced forever.
They're always trying to communicate with us,
and that's hard to explain,
but when you live with them
like I did on the Flipper TV show day and night,
I could read that body language.
There's something visceral
about being in the water with an animal like this.
As a scientist,
I'm trained to recognize intelligence through objective measures...
tool use, cognitive processes, and so on.
As a human being,
when I see a dolphin looking at me and his eyes tracking me
and I lock eyes with that animal,
there's a human response that makes it undeniable
that I'm connecting with an intelligent being.
Science has been tantalized for years at the prospect of talking
to the most intelligent creatures on earth,
which may not be human beings.
A small group of scientists
determined to see if humans and dolphins
can learn to talk to each other.
We keep spending billions of dollars for sending signals up into the sky,
and we have a species here
that can conceivably be more intelligent than we are.
Dolphins can understand how to manipulate situations,
how to relate to people,
how to create innovatively out of their own imagination.
It sometimes amazes me
that the only language
which has been extensively taught to dolphins
is a version of American Sign Language,
which, of course, you use your hands,
so you have all these wonderful signals,
and people use their hands to give messages to dolphins.
And this somehow kind of misses the point
because dolphins don't have hands,
so this is inherently a very one-way process.
And it's this anthropomorphic
"We have something to teach them or control them,"
and perhaps we ought to be looking at what they can give to us.
It's not about intelligence.
It's about consciousness.
They are self-aware, like humans are self-aware.
That means that we look in the mirror,
and we know exactly what we're looking at.
I don't believe that the fishermen here are aware of that.
When they're in that killing cove
and their babies are being slaughtered in front of them,
they're aware of that.
They can anticipate what's going to happen to them.
The first time I went to Taiji was in 1980,
and I had been to Iki the year before.
Iki is a tourist destination for Japanese
which became infamous
for this... most ghastly slaughters of dolphins.
I mean, literally thousands of them would... could be killed in a day.
Well, I went back to Iki about three years ago,
and they don't have any dolphins,
where once they had thousands of them streaming by the coast.
Irony of ironies.
Because the international captivity trade is so lucrative,
they want to be in on it,
and they don't have any dolphins.
They have to have dolphins for their dolphin parks,
so they go buy them in Taiji now.
Every cetacean known to man is endangered
just by going anywhere near Japan.
We asked the Taiji fishermen if we could subsidize this activity...
in other words, if you leave the boats tied up at the dock,
we'll pay you the same amount of money
you would have made killing dolphins in Taiji.
They got back to us and said "It's not about money.
It's about pest control."
Pest control.
In other words,
they're being told by the government
that the dolphin are eating too much fish in the ocean.
This is not attempt just to incriminate whales as a bad guy.
However, we cannot ignore the fishing effort has been decreasing.
It's seriously hard to take that PowerPoint demonstration seriously.
I have to tell you that there is very strong evidence
that whales are consuming huge quantities of fish
that are also the target of fisheries.
The Government of Brazil wants to put on record
that to us it certainly amounts
to what only can be described as biological nonsense.
It is clear that the fisheries of the world are on decline,
and the obvious culprit is people,
and we don't want to acknowledge that.
We look at the ocean as a source of infinite quality seafood,
and I think we're learning some hard lessons
that this isn't true.
We're pulling the fish out of the ocean at such a rate
and eroding and diminishing our marine ecosystems
so bad that the whole thing could collapse.
70% of human beings, seven out of ten people,
rely as their principal protein on seafood.
If we lose access to fish in the sea,
we will be causing the biggest public health problem
human beings have ever faced.
The Japanese literally control the world marketplace in fish.
They have buyers in every major port in the world.
They're catching their fish from an ever-depleting supply,
and I think they have a real fear that they will run out of food.
What more logical thing could they do than catch whales to replace them?
International Whaling Commission is essentially killing
coastal small-type whaling communities like Taiji.
This body should seriously consider the proposal that is before us.
Dominica would like to compliment the Japanese delegation.
We strongly support the proposal.
Antigua and Barbuda supports this declaration in its entirety.
Do we have any concern, any sympathy
for the plight of the people of Japan?
This is an opportunity to help Japan.
We could help the Japanese cause and the people of Taiji.
We therefore urge this IWC to grant...
...their basic request for them to engage in whaling.
And therefore, St. Kitts and Nevis support this proposal.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
In my opinion, this has been sufficient enough time
to allow for the replenishment of species... of certain species...
which were in decline
and some others which were nearing extinction.
There are several facets in the interests out of Antigua in whaling.
First of all, the government
is presently interested in the whaling commission
because the Japanese government's paying them to be interested.
The Japanese government and their agencies
go to small bankrupt nations
and offer them financial support,
offer them whatever it takes,
firstly to get them to join the IWC
and then, when they get here, to vote for Japan.
This is how whaling in the 21st century works.
What kind of whales pass through Antigua?
We have...
I think the Commissioner might be...
I think there's some humpback whales...
- Yes. ...that pass through Antigua.
I'm not sure of the details
of the whales that pass through Antigua
at this point in time, but there are whales
that pass through our waters from time to time.
I have seen only...
My only interaction with whales are what I see on television.
It is so transparent to even the least perspicacious onlooker
that they have prostituted themselves for a few yen.
The Japanese government pays our fees, our annual fees,
for participation in the International Whaling Commission.
It has nothing to do with nutrition.
It simply has to do with the fact that "You voted for us,
"so let's give you something that you people can see
"that it was worth your while to sell your vote to us...
fisheries complexes."
Interestingly, the fisheries complexes built by Japan
have already gone into disuse
because it has nothing to do with fishing.
One neighbor got the goodies,
and every other neighbor wants a part of the goodies.
Every island in the Eastern Caribbean...
St. Kitts, Antigua, St. Vincent., St. Lucia,
Grenada, Dominica...
we all have the same goodies.
In Dominica, we have a $22 million fisheries complex
which is used for the local merchants to store imported chicken.
It's very sad to see the beautiful islands in the Caribbean
becoming neon-lit whorehouses for the Japanese.
It really runs counter to logic
why the Japanese continue
to keep this dying whaling business going,
especially when you get the facts
about the levels of mercury
and other contaminants in the meat.
I visited Japan earlier this year,
and I discovered that there was another peculiar reason
for the Japanese position at the IWC.
This has not got to do with economics.
it hasn't even got to do with politics.
It really has to do with the...
the remnants of a traditional notion of empire.
They had had enough of the West
telling them what to do and how to do it and when to do it.
"Well, you're not going to make us stop killing whales."
There's some kind of misplaced nationalistic pride at work.
It's an industry that is massively subsidized
by Japanese taxpayers,
and when you have those sorts of subsidies in place,
you invite corruption.
In order to perpetuate this cultural argument,
the Taiji dolphin hunters
started giving the dolphin meat away free
to the school system.
They're getting this in a form of propaganda.
They're not being told
that the free lunchmeat that their children are getting
are contaminated with high levels of mercury.
Are you aware of the Mayor of Taiji's plan
to distribute dolphin meat throughout Japan
to Japanese children?
I think you... correctly misunderstood.
Did I?
You perfectly misunderstood.
Two city council members came out on record.
They risked their...
if not their lives, their livelihood to speak out.
There's a saying in Japan
that says the nail that sticks out must be pounded down,
and so it's a real problem
just to stand up and be counted in Japan.
There's no environmental movement working actively on this issue
that has any kind of power at all in that country.
We are dumping in the environment
all kinds of chemicals like mercury, cadmium, lead.
We have the obligation...
We have a moral authority to do something about it.
In a few years,
we may look back and wonder what we did,
allowing more and more tons of meat to be consumed.
We have a moral obligation,
and let it not be said that you didn't know about it.
You know about it.
To me, you're either an activist or an inactivist,
and I wanted to be active.
I wanted to stop this.
I recognize it. Do you?
8335. Yeah, I do recognize it.
I think it was the double channels. Yep.
Can you go straight?
They're doing a circle.
Let's take a quick break.
Quick, quick, quick, quick.
- It's 766. It's the cop. - Is it?
Louie, Louie, are you there?
Yeah, that's cool.
Set it down.
There was kind of a collective horror when we started to see the footage.
It was mind-boggling.
They're doing it exactly
like they did with the large whales.
they're slaughtering every one they can get.
Why didn't they set them free?
That question has kept me awake for a long time.
I've watched them give birth.
I've nursed them back to health when they're sick.
Had I known what I know now,
I would have raised enough money
to buy them away from the Seaquarium
and set them free.
That would have been the right thing to do.
I was buying a new Porsche every year.
But I was as ignorant as I could be for as long as I could be.
I didn't think about that for a long time later.
Listen to me.
Our killing method has been improved substantially,
and the fishermen in Taiji
are using specific-made knife
and put the... do that... to the spine,
and then most of the animals are killed instantly.
- Killed instantly? - Yes.
And if they were killed other than this method,
would that be cruel?
As I told you, I don't want to talk about "if" stories.
I want to show you some video that I just saw.
When and where did you take this?
I have to see this end in my lifetime.
Right now I'm focusing on that one little body of water
where that slaughter takes place.
If we can't stop that, if we can't fix that,
forget about the bigger issues.
There's no hope.
Subtitled By J.R. Media Services, Inc. Burbank, CA
Everyone there, show us your passport.
Hey. How are you?
Nice to see you.
So we went for... for the children, you see.