Village ‘ransoms’ dolphins to animal rights groups for big payouts
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Villagers bang stones underwater to disorient the dolphins, directing them to the beach where they can be captured. Photo: thedolphinproject.net
In her new book, “Voices in the Ocean,” journalist Susan Casey examines our kinship with dolphins, and how that love affair can go wrong — as it does with the “swim with dolphin” resorts that pen up the intelligent creatures. In this excerpt, she reveals how one entrepreneur’s idea for a “dolphin resort” set off a horrific chain of events.
In 2013, a remote village in the Solomon Islands called Fanalei announced that its residents had killed nearly 1,000 dolphins in two days, followed by another 300 to 400 dolphins the next day.
The villagers vowed to continue killing as many dolphins as they possibly could until they were paid.
It was a hostage situation, tense and gnarly and haywire, and, ironically, one that had begun with the best of intentions.
The environmental group Earth Island Institute had ventured to Fanalei and two other villages, Walande and Bita’ama, in 2010 and offered a proposal: If the villagers would stop hunting dolphins, their communities would receive financial support. Money would become available to build schools, create sustainable businesses, and shore up houses. After much communal discussion, all three villages accepted the deal. Earth Island then began to release the funds, large sums entrusted to village elders.
In Bita’ama and Walande, things went smoothly. The money was transferred and used as intended; the dolphin hunting halted.
In Fanalei, however, things went awry. After the first payments were wired, they promptly disappeared, siphoned off by a splinter clan of Fanalei associates who lived in Honiara, Guadalcanal’s capital.
The people who were supposed to distribute the village’s cash claimed they’d never received it, despite records proving it had been sent.
In Fanalei — an outpost near the southern tip of Malaita, an island 60 miles from Guadalcanal — the locals who hadn’t received any money looked for someone to blame. Everyone was enraged at everyone. Wilson Fileil, the chief who had brokered the deal, was forced out. The villagers, he told the Solomon Star newspaper, had embarked on “a killing spree.”
When pods swam by their island, the men pushed off in their dugout canoes and captured about 900 bottlenose, spinner and spotted dolphins, including 240 calves. The villagers’ hunting method is primitive — banging stones underwater to disorient the dolphins, then running them to the beach — but deadly effective.
Once the pods were driven into the mangrove shallows, the Fanalei women waded into the water, too, wrestling dolphins into canoes, dragging them onto shore by their tails, grabbing them by their beaks and slinging them over their backs.
While men whacked at the thrashing animals with machetes and women harvested the teeth, children played with headless dolphin carcasses, lolling in pools of blood.
Teeth currency
To grasp the pitch of local hostilities, you have to consider the Solomon Islands’ history, and it isn’t a pretty tale. The Solomons existed apart from civilization until the 19th and early 20th centuries arrived, bringing cruelty: European traders enslaved thousands of natives and forced them into labor on sugar plantations.
In 1978, the islands gained independence and struggled to find their footing amid clan violence. (It didn’t help the Solomons’ sense of unity that 90 different languages were spoken throughout the country, by a populace strung across a vast archipelago.)
Ethnic clashes and weak government led to a savage civil war from 1998 to 2003, a period known as “The Tensions.” It was a lawless time, people turning on one another with automatic weapons, World War II detritus, machetes, knives and anything else they could get their hands on. It took an Australian-led, multinational peacekeeping force to put a lid on the marauding; the soldiers are still in residence today.
Unlike Japan, the Solomon Islands really do have a tradition of hunting dolphins that goes back centuries. In the past, these hunts were sacred events, called by dolphin priests. They happened seasonally and were modest in their take.
Only spinner and spotted dolphins could be killed, as few as possible to serve the village’s needs; there were prayers and rituals to honor the dolphins who gave their lives.
Then, it was a deeply spiritual endeavor; now, like so many pursuits, it’s mostly about cash. Dolphin teeth are prized as a currency, used in rural commerce. They are required, for instance, to buy cigarettes, a pig, or a bride — a woman costs at least a thousand teeth.
During ceremonies in dolphin-hunting communities, both men and women will be decked out in dolphin-tooth necklaces, earrings, headdresses, belts: a lone person might be wearing 20 dolphins. Each dolphin tooth is worth between 50 cents and $1, depending on its size and quality. The more teeth a family displays, the higher its social status.
The trade begins
Into this combustible mix came a Zippo lighter. In 2002, Christopher Porter, a 32-year-old former marine-mammal trainer from British Columbia, Canada, made his way to Fanalei.
Porter, a burly guy with a surplus of nerve, had a vision that he expressed to the villagers in pidgin, the Solomons’ lingua franca mash-up of English and Melanesian. The dolphins they were butchering for meat and teeth, Porter told them, were extremely valuable in the outside world. If the villagers helped him catch them, they would receive great benefits.
Porter wanted to build a luxury resort near where guests could “get closer to dolphins than they ever dreamed.” He seemed unconcerned that a country overrun by warlords was generally not a big draw for tourists.
The Malaitans listened. If they had a talent, it was for snagging pods of dolphins. Their villages had nothing, and Porter was offering jobs, boats, cash. The tattered government granted Porter a 100-dolphin export permit and a lease on 40-acre Gavutu Island.
Porter partnered with a Malaitan chief named Robert Satu, and almost immediately 94 dolphins were hauled in and penned up in Gavutu, and at a grotty marina in Honiara.
In July 2003, the two men exported 28 bottlenoses to Parque Nizuc, a swim-with-dolphins facility in Cancún, Mexico. (Like most countries, Mexico has banned the capture of dolphins within its own waters.) One of the dolphins died upon arrival; the surviving 27 swam in tight circles emitting high-pitched screams for several days. Within 18 months, another nine were gone.
Porter and Satu shipped Solomons’ dolphins not only to Mexico, but also to China and the Philippines, despite a global outcry against the practice. In October 2007, 28 freshly captured bottlenoses were loaded onto two chartered Emirates DC-10s for a 30-hour journey to Dubai. Their future home would be Atlantis, The Palm, a $1.5 billion resort built on an artificial island made from 94 million cubic meters of sand, dredged out of the Persian Gulf.
In Honiara, the country’s fisheries minister bragged that each Dubai-bound bottlenose had sold for $200,000, with the government receiving a 25 percent export tax.
Porter and Satu’s dolphin exploits, once they became known, drew international condemnation. When journalists tried to investigate the Honiara dolphin pens, they were met by armed Solomon Islanders — gang members hired by Satu, who looked on with a satisfied smile as tribesmen slapped the news cameras away. A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald was hit in the head with a concrete block.
Chief Satu was a small, flinty man who looked wizened beyond his 51 years; dolphin-tooth necklaces crisscrossed his chest like bandoliers. This business of shipping dolphins to marine parks was massively profitable, he said: “It’s big — bigger than gold or logging.”
Satu mused about the possibility of every village having its own “dolphin farm.”
“We’ve already created the market,” he said. “They could just follow.”
Dolphins’ ‘Darth Vader’
Not long after the Cancún export, Earth Island representatives flew to Honiara and found that the dolphins were so malnourished and dehydrated that some had developed a condition called “peanut head,” their skulls showing clearly beneath their skin.
Some of Porter’s bottlenoses died after being fed rotten fish; another environmental group reported that a dolphin had been eaten by a crocodile.
Porter asserted this all happened while he was out of the country. “Like the rest of the world, just blame Chris Porter,” he complained. “I’m the monster in activists’ heads. Everyone thinks I’m the worst man on Earth for dolphins. I’m the one who catches them all and I’m the greedy one and I’m the exploiter.”
According to Porter, the opposite was true. “I love animals,” he said. “I cried during ‘Old Yeller.’ ” Few people, however, saw him as a friend to wildlife. Porter was dubbed “the Darth Vader of Dolphins,” a nickname that stuck.
It was in the traffickers’ interest for the hunts to continue, conservationists explained, because then they could export the animals with less controversy, by claiming they were “saving” them.
If Porter had set out to make his pitch at a vulnerable moment, he’d succeeded. “He came at the height of the Tensions,” said Lawrence Makili, Earth Island’s local director. “To take advantage of the situation. There was no law and order.”
During the country’s civil war, he explained, traditional dolphin hunting had all but stopped. It was only Fanalei that was rounding up pods: “It was a dying practice. But it started up again because Chris Porter came waving the flag of money!”
Held for ransom
From what I could gather, Porter’s last days in the Solomons had been bad ones. A rift developed between him and the tribesmen, and he left the country. The Gavutu headquarters was dismantled.
But the dolphin trade he had introduced kept going.
‘WE WILL SLAUGHTER THE DOLPHINS OF THE WHOLE EARTH!’
- Tigi Emmanuel
Conservation groups tried to stop it. Earth Island officials, including American activist Ric O’Barry, met with various leaders, including Tigi Emmanuel, Bita’ama’s chief. In video of the negotiation, Tigi appeared in his dolphin priest costume — a sarong, ropes of dolphin-tooth necklaces, a dolphin-tooth headdress, ceremonial armbands, and what looked like a set of raffia wings on his back — and announced that the villagers demanded $12 million a year to lay down their machetes. If the money was not paid, Tigi had bellowed, “We will slaughter the dolphins of the whole Earth!”
In the end, Bita’ama settled for a lesser sum, and now Chief Tigi was a happy man, thrilled with Earth Island’s contributions to his villages: fuel drums, machine parts, a portable sawmill, lumber for houses. He was a skilled spokesman, neat in Oakley blade sunglasses and a white golf shirt, outlining Bita’ama’s new dolphin-friendly philosophy with a politician’s air. “We normally kill and eat dolphins,” he began, “but now we want dolphins to be safe.”
As proof, he showed me a photo of some tribesmen, standing waist-deep in the ocean snuggling dolphins in their arms like babies. When the agreement with Earth Island was signed, Tigi said, the villagers had 160 dolphins penned in their lagoon, ready for slaughter. Instead, as a gesture of good faith, they had released them.
Of course, the problem with bribery is once the money stops — or, in the case of Fanalei, is embezzled — the hostage is killed. Fanalei continues to hunt dolphins that pass by its remote shores, and the village’s mangrove shallows are littered with bones. Threatened with economic sanctions, the country’s government has officially banned live dolphin exports, but at least one clandestine shipment to China has allegedly occurred.
Chris Porter opened a Pandora’s box, it seems, that no one has been able to close.
Excerpted from “Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins” by Susan Casey, out now from Doubleday. For ongoing information about conservationists’ attempts to end dolphin hunting in the Solomon Islands, see http://www.thedolphinproject.net.
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