Word: flippers
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Forty years ago, Richard O'Barry watched Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, kill herself. Or so he says. She looked him in the eye, sank to the bottom of a steel tank and stopped breathing. The moment transformed the dolphin trainer into an animal-rights activist for life, and his role in The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary about the dolphin-meat business in a small town in Japan, has transformed him into a celebrity...
...irony is that O'Barry believes he's partly to blame. The dolphins that are killed are the leftovers from searches to find performers for aquatic parks, places that might not exist if hadn't been for Flipper mania. It's a lucrative trade. O'Barry says a trained dolphin can sell for as much as $150,000. In Taiji, the public is welcome to watch the selection of dolphins by trainers. What most people aren't allowed to see is what happens afterward, when the ones that didn't make the cut are moved to the next rockbound inlet...
...turns out he's Ric O'Barry, a forgotten face from 1960s pop culture. As a young man, he captured and trained Flipper--or rather, the five dolphins that played that beloved cetacean. He became a passionate opponent of keeping dolphins in captivity after the death of one of the Flippers, a bottlenose named Kathy. Now he's a crusader on a mission: In a small, isolated cove in Taiji, Japan, where O'Barry has become a part-time resident (and pest), thousands of dolphins are being trapped and slaughtered every year. Since 2003, O'Barry has been desperately trying...
Just a few years ago, Sergei Naumov was a small-time house flipper in the St. Augustine, Fla., area who wanted to sell his home and move to a nearby town. "I had real trouble selling my house," he said. "But I got to thinking that there had to be someone in our shoes in the town where we wanted to move who wanted to live in our town...
...Flipper Patrol...