Any Way to Treat a Dolphin?

Village chief Robert Satu believes he has a rare gift: the ability to summon wild dolphins. He stands in the bow of his small fishing boat, calls to the animals and asks them to swim toward his nets. Until recently, the dolphins would end up as dinner.

Satu, 51, says he has used his talent to kill 483 dolphins during traditional hunts in this South Pacific nation, harvesting the meat to feed his village and the teeth to use as money.

Now he has found a better way to make hard cash -- catching dolphins alive and selling them to an aquatic park halfway around the world.

“For me it’s finished. No killing anymore,” he said. “We have to look after the dolphins.”

During the last nine months, Satu and his crew have caught 95 Pacific bottlenose dolphins for the tourist trade, sparking an international uproar far greater than any controversy they ever caused by eating them.

In July, Satu and his foreign partners, led by Canadian entrepreneur Christopher Porter, sold 28 of the dolphins to Parque Nizuc in Cancun, Mexico, for the increasingly popular activity of swimming with the beloved mammals. In the largest transfer of wild dolphins ever recorded by international regulators, a chartered DC-10 arrived from Brazil and flew the animals 12,800 miles from the island of Guadalcanal to their new home in the Caribbean.

The lucrative deal inflamed animal-welfare activists, who oppose keeping the highly intelligent creatures in captivity. They said the transaction bent international rules governing the trade in wildlife and ignored the ecological risks of moving a species from the Pacific to an environment half a world away.

“Think about what happened to those dolphins,” said former dolphin trainer Richard O’Barry, a consultant for the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals, as he observed the creatures from a Cancun beach. “They were abducted by aliens and transported here in a UFO. They are traumatized.”

Those involved in the deal say they complied with the laws of Mexico and the Solomon Islands.

All 28 dolphins survived the 17-hour flight but one died a week later, apparently from ailments associated with stress.

Nine more of the captive dolphins died in the Solomon Islands from stress and illness; 55 remain there.

Besieged by activists upset by the animal’s death in Cancun, the Mexican government has suspended imports of dolphins from the Solomon Islands and temporarily closed Parque Nizuc’s dolphinarium while the surviving mammals are tested for viruses. Mexico’s Congress has come under pressure to extend the import ban to all dolphins and make it permanent.

The dolphin capture has aroused less controversy in the Solomon Islands, a nation of 500,000 people where lawlessness, tribal warfare, widespread malaria and unrelenting poverty are of much greater concern.

The former British colony, best known for the bloody World War II battle at Guadalcanal, gained independence in 1978 but has been plagued by ethnic fighting that claimed hundreds of lives during the last five years. In July, thousands of troops from an Australian-led peacekeeping force arrived to restore order and begin rebuilding,

The government is so poor that the Fisheries Department does not have a single boat to patrol the country’s 992 islands, scattered across a region twice the size of Texas. Into this chaotic setting came the foreigners seeking dolphins for the tourist trade. The government welcomed them with open arms.

Porter, a former head trainer at the Vancouver Aquarium, teamed up with Greek investor Christos Mazarakis and Mike Schultz, an American dolphin trainer who had helped introduce the business of swimming with dolphins in the Bahamas, Mexico and Palau.

Schultz said the group was drawn to the Solomons by the hundreds of thousands of dolphins in the country’s waters. Calling their enterprises Marine Export Ltd. and the Solomon Islands Marine Mammal Education Center, the group leased the remote island of Gavutu and said it planned to establish a resort where visitors could swim with dolphins.

Such resorts became popular -- and highly profitable -- in the United States in the late 1980s. They are spreading rapidly in Asia and Latin America. More than 30 parks have opened in the Caribbean since 1990. At Parque Nizuc, a sprawling 6-year-old facility that features swimming pools and waterslides, tourists pay $90 for 30 minutes of swimming with dolphins in the seawater lagoon off Cancun’s strip of hotels.

Restrictions on dolphin captures off Mexico, the United States and elsewhere limited availability and started Mexicans on a search for suppliers that led to the Solomon Islands. Parque Nizuc reached a tentative agreement last October to buy 100 dolphins from Porter’s enterprise, although the number was later reduced.

Satu, using his unusual method, began catching dolphins for the partnership.

The annual dolphin hunt is part of a Solomon Islands tradition that is at least 500 years old. The hunt, essential for both money and marriage, follows strict rules. Most of the hunters, all of whom are men, live in seven villages on the island of Malaita. They must purify themselves for at least a month before the hunt by living in a special house away from their village and having no contact with women.

Paddling as many as 40 dugout canoes, they may spend days searching for dolphins. They call them by banging together two stones believed to have magic power. When the animals come, the hunters encircle them with their canoes, drive them to shore and trap them in shallow water. It is not unusual for hunters to trap 100 dolphins at a time.

Satu said the islanders kill about 10,000 dolphins a year, although the government downplays the harvest, estimating the take at 600 to 1,500 dolphins. Three years ago, Satu said, one village harvested 760 dolphins in a single day.

Malaitans -- one of the country’s dominant tribal groups -- use the teeth of the spotted dolphin as money, typically spending 1,000 teeth to secure a bride, although the price can range from a token 200 to as many as 5,000. The informal exchange rate is one tooth to the Solomon dollar, or about seven to the U.S. dollar. A spotted dolphin, which has 200 teeth, is worth about $30 dead.

With the arrival of the captive dolphin trade, some of the creatures became much more valuable alive.

Porter’s company will not disclose the sale price to Parque Nizuc, but estimates range from $15,000 to $50,000 for a bottlenose dolphin. A single animal can earn an aquarium up to $2,000 a day by swimming with tourists. The Mexicans paid $400,000 just for the charter flight to transport the animals from the Solomons, one insider said.

Late last year, Porter’s company set up two facilities for the captive dolphins. One is on Guadalcanal at a small marina in Honiara, the nation’s capital. The other is in Gavutu, where pens have been set up in the small, man-made harbor of a World War II-era Japanese seaplane base. Put on the defensive by animal rights activists’ charges of cruelty, the dolphin captors were secretive at first, refusing to let journalists observe the holding pens or the export operation. An Australian cameraman trying to film the Honiara pens from a motorboat was hit with a chunk of concrete thrown by one of the workers.

In August, however, Schultz brought a boatload of critics to view the Gavutu pens. Later, he gave The Times access to both facilities.

At Gavutu, the company has divided the small bay into eight pens with mangrove fences underwater and floating bamboo walkways. The water in the pens ranges from three to 15 feet deep at low tide. Critics say that is too shallow, providing an insufficient flow of clean water. Schultz said the size exceeds U.S. standards, but also said he plans to deepen the shallowest pen.

The dolphins spend much of their time resting at the surface with their snouts sticking out of the water. At other times they are active: breaching, fighting, playing with floating objects, slapping their tails and trying to mate. Many have old scars from fighting with other dolphins, but there were no signs of recent cuts or blistering.

“It’s a good sign to see them playing with sticks and leaves. It tells us about their mental state,” Schultz said. “It’s a great sign to see sexual behavior. It means they are relaxed.”

The dolphins are fed by hand, and most appeared to be eating well. Schultz said they eat four times a day, consuming 18 pounds of fish each. The company needs nearly 1,000 pounds of fish a day, which it buys from villagers for 50 cents a pound.

Schultz said the group plans to release all but 35 dolphins, breed the remaining ones in Gavutu and train them to swim with tourists. Critics are skeptical of the plan to build a tourist attraction on the malaria-infested island, but Schultz denies their charge that it’s a front for selling dolphins overseas.

Solomon Islands officials insist that the export of up to 100 dolphins a year would not threaten the survival of the species. They acknowledge that no thorough study has been done but estimate that there are 750,000 to 1.5 million dolphins in the Solomons. “The dolphins are a resource, and if they can be used in a proper way, they can benefit the people of the Solomon Islands,” said Peter Ramohia, deputy director of the Fisheries Department.

When Parque Nizuc asked for an import permit in April, the Geneva-based Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species instructed Mexico to get statistical evidence from the Solomon Islands that dolphins there were not endangered. The 163-nation regulatory body also required medical certificates stating that each dolphin was free of disease.

Parque Nizuc owner Bernardo Zambrano lobbied for quick approval of the permit. “He said that because of the political upheaval in the Solomons, he was going to have to bring out his people who were training the dolphins,” leaving the captive animals to an uncertain fate, said Georgita Ruiz, an official with Mexico’s Environment Ministry who resisted the request. “He pointed out that people in the Solomons eat dolphins.”

The ministry approved the permit in early July, even though it never got the required statistics. It did get health certificates, but from a private veterinarian who tested the dolphins for parasites and salmonella but not for viruses.

In the ensuing uproar, which included diplomatic protests from the ecologically minded governments of Australia and New Zealand, animal activists argued that Mexico could have blocked the request because the waters off Cancun are part of a national park in which the risk of contamination makes it illegal to introduce “exotic species.”

The Mexican government is investigating whether any laws or regulations were violated or ignored in granting the permit.

“All together, it was a fairly irregular procedure,” said Andres Rozental, Mexico’s delegate to the International Whaling Commission. “This amusement park went to a place that was in total chaos in terms of administration and bought these dolphins.... It was a pretty dicey sort of deal.”

Parque Nizuc’s owner thought he had won the struggle July 22, when his 28 new dolphins landed in Cancun aboard the cargo jet, each suspended from a blue sling hung from a metal frame inside a water tank.

The newcomers -- 15 males and 13 females between 6 and 15 years old -- were trucked to their new home, wheeled onto a pier and tilted gently from their water tanks into six sea corrals measuring 10 by 60 feet on the surface and about 10 feet deep.

For several days they made eerie, high-pitched screams, an apparent sign of stress. The controversy might have faded along with the screaming had it not been for the death, a week later, of a 15-year-old female.

Alarmed by the possibility that an infectious disease could spread from the animals, the Environment Ministry ordered them quarantined from the park’s 15 Caribbean-born dolphins and tested more thoroughly for disease. When the park resisted, the government ordered the dolphinarium closed until it complies. One of the Caribbean-born dolphins died Aug. 22, the day the attraction was shut.

Initial tests have indicated that both dolphins died of stomach ulcers, not infections. Mexican officials, calling the deaths unrelated, said the ulcers apparently resulted from the stress of the Pacific dolphin’s arduous journey and the Caribbean dolphin’s ostracism by its own group.

The animal activists are now demanding that Mexican authorities take custody of the Solomon Islands dolphins, stabilize their health and send them back to their native waters. Although government inspectors visiting the dolphinarium twice a day report that the newcomers are healthy, camera-toting activists keeping vigil from a nearby beach claim that several appear to be gravely ill.

In his spacious director’s office inside the park, Mauricio Martinez spoke like a man under siege -- from both animal rights activists and government inspectors.

“Look, I accept that there are conflicting views about animals in captivity,” he said. “But I can also tell you that we make thousands of children and families happy every year. We had an impeccable record, zero mortality, until all this noise and all these activists.” He suggested that the hubbub surrounding the dolphins was adding to their stress.

Although activists have been vocal in their opposition to the capture of dolphins in the Solomons, they have said almost nothing about the practice of eating them. Until now, some said, they were unaware that the islanders were devouring dolphins. Combating the hunting tradition of a native people, others said, can be highly sensitive.

In Honiara, the men who helped catch the dolphins protest that the Solomon Islands is being held to a different standard from other countries.

What is the difference, they say, between keeping dolphins in a pen in the Solomon Islands and keeping elephants in a zoo in America? “If we have to let them go, tell the rest of the world to let all their animals go,” said Robert Satu Jr., the chief’s 20-year-old son. “Make it fair.”

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Paddock was recently on assignment in the Solomon Islands and Boudreaux reported from Cancun.