The Cove

If you are up for the gruesome reality it portrays, the award winning documentary, The Cove, shines a movie camera into the behind the scenes world of the not so "theme park-esque" reality associated with capturing the dolphins regularly used for those marine park dolphin shows. Filmed in the genre of a thriller, the film-makers sneak into the locales where dolphins are culled from the wild and the picture is not too pretty.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the documentary packed them in at Sundance where it won the audience award for documentaries. The WSJ notes some of the film's highlights:

--the rounding up of the dolphins in the wild which involves planting metal poles in the water and hitting them, sending the noise sensitive dolphins into a nearby cove, where nets are waiting for them
--fishermen and divers sort through those rounded up, looking for the easy-to-train bottlenose dolphins and moving the others into another hidden location where they are killed for their meat

Like I said, it is not pretty, but the action takes place in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji and features Ric O'Barry, who trained the dolphins for the television show, Flipper. After he saw the animals he worked with die in captivity, he became an advocate for releasing dolphins from marine parks around the country.

Not a bad mission, if you ask me, who admits to having gone swimming with dolphins in Florida at a marine mammal facility as well as watched many others participate in theme park shows. The swimming was incredible--but nothing compared with actually swimming with them in the wild, in New Zealand. The shows were fun but those dolphins should have been performing those tricks in the wild for each other.

Go see the movie if you need any more convincing.