The Barbarity Hidden in the 'The Cove'
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

'The Cove' is a documentary that will stick with you for a long time.

I had the opportunity to catch the award-winning documentary up for an Oscar this year The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos and written by Mark Monroe. The story is a journey of heartbreaking atonement.

Richard O’Barry, the resident dolphin trainer of the hit TV show Flipper, pioneered the captive dolphin industry for ten years of his early life. He was the spokesman and he helped grow it into a booming business, being the one who captured the 5 dolphins that would end up playing Flipper. He has since come to see that though he had good intentions and was making a living off of it, such self-aware, highly-intelligent and sensitive creatures don’t deserve to be captured and made to perform. He has spent the last 30 years seeking to atone for his previous actions, to no avail.

The documentary centers around a cove in the Wakayama prefecture of Japan, in the coastal town of Taiji. From the outside, the town looks welcoming enough. It seems to be fascinated with the dolphin as an icon. There are paintings, statues and structures devoted to the magnificence of the dolphin. Things starts to get hairy when you enter a certain area of the town.

The police, even the chief of police, start to tail Rick and his guests. There are guards there, all wielding video cameras to try to catch activists initiating violence. There is barbed wire fencing and signs that clearly don’t welcome outsiders. And a cove, shielded from the outside world, that is designed to hold hundreds of passing dolphins, for inhumane slaughter. The lucrative dolphin entertainment industry demands playful bottle-nose dolphins similar to Flipper – selling for six figures each – to be sent all over the world. The rest are slaughtered for considerably less for their mercury-tainted meat, poisoning the prefecture in a cover-up that even involves government officials.

Rick and his gang know something is up. They can see the bloody water seeping out of the cove. They can see injured dolphins escape, only to die moments from shore. Everything is before them but they can’t do anything about it without being thrown in jail. This happy-go-lucky dolphin-loving town is really the final resting place of up to 23,000 dolphins a year. Yet no major animal rights groups have dolphin preservation on their agenda. Rick is determined to do something about it. A team is assembled of daredevils and free-divers. Thermal cameras, sound equipment, and video cameras camouflaged in rock enclosures. They went all out to assemble a specialized team to pull off a covert mission, Oceans 11-style. If the world is confronted with his story and the violence of the dolphin genocide, something would eventually have to be done.

Obviously, things worked out or else The Cove wouldn’t have been made. Go check it out for yourself. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. The crazy thing about it is that it is a documentary. Everything is real. Everything happened. And yet, it has all the elements of a good movie. High action, a complex plot, evil villains and a fearless band of heroes with no regard for international law. Everything could have gone up in flames any given moment. And you really feel for Rick and the plight of the dolphins. So check it out! You won’t regret it one bit.