HELPING HAND: “As a pertson that really does love animals, I could not fathom leaving behind so many donlphins on shore for teeth and meat,” says Porter Photograph by John Wilson For TIME.

The Solomon Islands tuna industry is threatened as a determined Canadian dolphin exporter faces down powerful anti-captivity activists

From TIME magazine, April 24, 2006. By Rory Callinan, Gavutu

It’s hard to work out who’s teaching what at the Solomon Islands Marine Mammal Education Centre’s facility on Gavutu Island. Muscular Islanders warn offuninvited visitors to the dolphin pens on the former World War II Japanese seaplane base, about 45km north-east of the capital Honiara. Inside, the 20 dolphins squeak softly and roll over to eyeball their captors as they swim monotonous laps around three tennis court-sized ponds.

The cetaceans are of the Indian Pacific bottlenose species, but there are no signs, brochures or information booklets on display to detail the type or their habits; the only potential observation area is a rough tin-roofed shelter. And the only trick performed the day TIME visited was the disappearance of defrosted fish down hungry dolphin throats.

Since the facility was established in 2003, at least 22 dolphins have died, either in the pens or in catching operations. Some were killed by a mysterious bug that came with some refrozen fish; a dozen spotted dolphins, a species which has never survived in captivity, simply pined to death. Earlier this year, four more dolphins starved just meters from the open sea when a cyclone cut their fish supply. “I call it a ghetto for dolphins,” says campaigner Richard O’Barry, who trained dolphins for the TV series Flipper. “They are floating there like coconuts, and that’s because they have nothing to do in the pens.”

The facility has become a symbol of a long-running battle between a group of dolphin exporters and powerful anti-captivity activists that threatens the Solomons’ tunafishing industry, mars its environmental credentials and jeopardizes a century-old tradition of dolphin hunting.

While much of the Western world dotes on the dolphin as a unique, intelligent and sociable creature deserving protected status, Solomon Islanders hold a different view. Every January, after the trade winds have dropped, scores of men from remote villages on the east coast of Malaita paddle their canoes up to I0km out to sea. When they spy the fins and breaching motion that signifies a pod of dolphins, the men raise a signal flag, converge behind the animals and begin to pound rocks together underwater.

The panicked creatures flee into the shallows where they are caught by hand, taken back to a village and killed and eaten. Their  heads are cut off and their teeth pulled out and made into necklaces which double as local currency. Says Malaitan Robert Maemae, “We believe we are coming from the dolphin. The dolphin is our master in our custom. We talk to the dolphins. We use the teeth to pay bride price.” (A tooth can fetch up to A50 cents depending on where it is sold across the islands; a dolphin may have up to 98 teeth.)

Teeth are made into necklaces and used as money. Photograph by John Wilson For TIME.

The hunting went undisturbed for centuries, until the arrival three years ago of a Canadian with an entrepreneurial streak. Chris Porter, a former sea-lion trainer from Vancouver, decided to establish a dolphin export business and a tourist resort in Solomon Islands after learning of the tradition while working in Vanuatu. “If it is in Solomon Islanders’ culture to kill them, then I thought they would not be anti-captivity,” he says.

With backing from overseas partners, Porter set up two companies in 2003: the Solomon Islands Marine Mammal Education Centre and Marine Export Ltd. He says SIMMEC was to help establish a resort where guests would swim with and get to know the Gavutu dolphins. The export company was established to sell animals overseas. Porter says his catching operations rescued dolphins that were already being hunted. “I could leave them on the beach to become a necklace or keep them,” he says. After rounding up nearly 100 animals, Porter selected the best, shipping 28 dolphins to Cancun in Mexico in July 2003. He declines to reveal how much the shipment earned him, but rejects activists’ claims that some animals may have commanded prices of $100,000 each. Six of the exported dolphins later died in Mexico.

But Porter’s activities in this remote part of the Pacific had not gone unnoticed. The widely publicized export infuriated the anticaptivity lobby and drew the attention of environmental groups. Leading the pack was one of the biggest green gorillas on the block -- Earth Island Institute, a San Francisco-based organization that is involved in dozens of environment protection projects around the world. “We’re the people who freed Keiko the killer whale,” says the institute’s assistant director of the International Marine Mammal Project, Mark Berman.

Earth Island was joined by O’Barry, who has mounted bold rescue missions around the world to release captive dolphins. It is a powerful combination. Earth Island wields vast influence in the tuna industry, acting as un-official police to ensure tuna are caught in dolphin-friendly ways. If fishing operations occur in an accredited manner, companies are permitted to use the Institute’s dolphin-safe logo on their product, potentially adding millions of dollars to sales.

In 2004, Earth Island’s pressure forced the companies that purchased the tuna catch from the Solomons’ fishing company, Soltai, to back off unless live dolphin exports were stopped. Facing damage to the industry, the Solomon Islands government declared a ban on export in November last year. Earth Island and O’Barry then set their sights on the release of the dolphins from Gavutu. O’Barry says he has seen videos which prove the dolphins are being “bored to death,” and are suffering sunburn and malnourishment.

Porter denies the charges. When TIME visited Gavutu earlier this year, he showed off half-finished tourist accommodation that he hopes will become a luxury resort. And only last week he flagged further dolphin export shipments, and told how he recently gave a group of New South Wales parliamentary officials, led by legislative council president Dr. Meredith Burgmann, a tour of the facility where some of the group were allowed to “feed, swim, touch and play with” the dolphins. “We have a court case under way that will determine our ability to move the animals to other facilities with a larger tourist base, to support the high costs associated with housing dolphins,” he says. “In simple terms, death is bad for business. So it is preposterous for people to believe the activists’ claims that we do not care when animals die.”

WATCHDOG Berman checks that tuna boats pactise dolphin-friendly fishing. Photograph by John Wilson For TIME.

Berman insists the stakes are high. “The government knows that if they start exporting dolphins again, their tuna industry is going to shut down. What do they want to do, lose hundreds of jobs so Porter can sell a dolphin for $100,000?” But dealing with Porter may prove harder than Berman and O’Barry anticipate. In February the pair traveled to the Solomons to observe what they say was a promised government raid on the Gavutu center to rehabilitate and release the captured dolphins. Despite days of waiting, they say, the raids were never carried out. The Solomons government is not well placed to intervene, let alone referee. Elections have just been held and a government is still being formed, while resources for raids are in short supply. In February, then Minister for Environment and Conservation Mathias Taro told TIME: “If we do not put some policy to control this local harvesting of dolphins, then the ban will not be real to others.”

Some locals would like to see Porter’s businesses closed, but not for altruistic reasons. Says one villager: “1 want everybody to leave Gavutu, so I can dig up the dead dolphins, get their teeth and sell them.” It seems the one lesson being reinforced by the Marine Mammal Education Centre is one Solomon Islanders learned years ago-dolphins are worth money, and everyone wants a cut.

© 2006, Earth Island Institute, Elsa Nature Conservancy, In Defense of Animals, Animal Welfare Institute. All Rights Reserved.