Rick O’Barry on saving dolphins and The Cove

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast
In the 60s, the TV hit Flipper made us all fall in love with dolphins. Rick O’Barry is the man who trained the dolphins to do the tricks that were so endearing — and that spawned a whole industry of sea worlds and marine worlds and flipperworlds around the globe, committing dolphins to a lifelong sentence of enslavement and humiliation, all in the name of our entertainment.

These days Rick O’Barry feels sickeningly guilty about that, and has spent decades since dedicated to freeing dolphins. That mission has seen him arrested all around the world, thrown into jail, banned from conferences and other venues.

But it has also seen him expose the most horrendous and senseless massacre of dolphins, an annual slaughter of 23,000 dolphins that takes place for several months every year in a tiny cove near a town called Taji in Japan.