The process of dolphin rehabilitation
Five-minute read
There’s no set protocol for releasing captive dolphins in the wild. Various methods have been implemented over the years, but in order to do it right you’ve got to spend a lot of money.
Dolphin rehab is expensive because it takes a long time. In the 1990s when the U.S. Navy reduced funding their marine mammal program, they initially intended to implement a rehabilitation scheme for the dolphins they didn’t need any more.
If you’re wondering what the military needed with dolphins, their 100-strong underwater army were tasked with jobs like delivering equipment to divers underwater, locating and retrieving lost objects, guarding boats and submarines, and doing underwater surveillance using a camera held in their mouths.
It would have involved an initial 5-year period during which the dolphins would be trained to act like wild animals again. While that was going on, they’d have to figure out how to monitor the dolphins once they’d been released. They’d have to keep an eye on the dolphins for between two and six years to make sure they’d survive the transition.
The price tag on all that totals more than $20 million. They decided it wasn’t worth the cost, and while I’ve read that the Navy men promised to look after the dolphins that had been ejected from the program, I can’t find any evidence of that. Besides, if they only had funding to keep so many, how could they keep the surplus animals? I’m afraid it’s a mystery.
I talked about the release of Free Willy star Keiko the killer whale in episode six of A Dolphin Pod. He was a special case since his suffering was covered so heavily by the media. If he hadn’t been famous I’m not sure he would have been considered a good candidate for release.
The very first stage of freeing a captive dolphin is assessing how well it scores in the following four areas.
Health and physical condition
Echolocation capability
Ability to catch live fish
Defence against predators
A dolphin can’t survive in the sea without all of those factors in play. Keiko only had one of these in the bag when it was decided he’d get to go home to the wild. He could echolocate, but hadn’t hunted live fish since he was a tiny baby. They didn’t know how he’d fare against predators and he was of an advanced age and in very poor health.
He had to learn how to care for and defend himself, and the whole saga of his release took six and a half years. If he hadn’t been a movie star, there’s little doubt in my mind he would have died quietly in captivity, only to be replaced by another whale.
It’s very rare for a dolphin facility to voluntarily let their animals go. Even in dedicated rehabilitation centres, the vast majority of dolphins that come in as rescued are never considered for release. But, in theory, dolphins that rank highly enough in each of the above four categories can advance to phase two.
The next step after assessment is moving the animal from its captive enclosure to a sea pen. These tend to be bigger and deeper than standard aquarium tanks and contain natural sea water. The traditional design is pretty much just a roped-off area of coastal sea.
A major hurdle the animals have to get over is being so comfortable around humans. Comfortable is the wrong word. They have no choice but the learn to tolerate humans. I would describe is as closer to giving in than settling in.
In captivity, every single morsel of food a dolphin gets comes from the trainer’s bucket. That’s how dolphin training works. You hold their food to ransom until they do what you want. Undoing that damage takes a long time.
Once the dolphin is in the sea pen the people around it have to take a step back to let the animal focus on the challenges of the wild rather than their relationships with their trainers.
The final stage is to open the door to the wild. Literally. Keiko’s sea pen had a gate that they trainers could open and let him out into his native Icelandic waters. At first he was taken on supervised swims accompanied by a boat, but soon got to come and go as he pleased.
He finally took back to the ocean permanently after four years in his sea pen. That might sound like a long time, but they’d actually allotted longer for the transition. They had to speed things up because construction works were about to start nearby and it would have hurt Keiko’s hearing.
There is no standard duration each stage is likely to take. Each case is unique, and different dolphins will deal with the challenges of rewilding in their own way.
The big question is, can we let all the dolphins go? Again, there’s no globally agreed answer. Aquarium operators would almost definitely say no. They’d probably tell you that no dolphins can be let go. But I don’t believe them. They have a huge financial incentive to hold on to their dolphins no matter how much suffering captivity causes them.
Instead, I sought out the opinion of world-famous dolphin right campaigner and former marine mammal trainer Ric O’Barry. I found a whole rehab and release protocol on the Dolphin Project website and I want to show you what he said about the suitability of certain dolphins for release -
Many captive dolphins born in the wild’are candidates for release. But not all of them. Some dolphins have received too many human imprints and have forgotten or lost the skills needed to survive in what was once their home. Habitat dictates behavior. Captivity has destroyed something vital in their lives, something that, were they human, we would call ‘spirit.’ For them, it is too late.
Some years ago I had occasion to study a dolphin in Nassau, Bahamas, who had been in captivity for a long time. They called him ‘Big Boy’ and he spent much of his time ramming his head against the wooden entrance to his sea pen.
On the other side was the sea, his natural home. And as I watched him banging his head against the gate one day, I wondered if it would be possible to re-adapt him to the wild again. What would happen if we simply let him go?
In the old days at the Miami Seaquarium when we no longer needed a particular dolphin, we put him in a sling, carried him out to the seawall and simply dumped him into Biscayne Bay. In the captivity industry this is called a ‘Dump and Run.’
But Big Boy was quite another problem dolphin. Captivity had turned him into a mental cripple. If we could re-adapt him, I thought, we could re-adapt any dolphin. But the longer I watched, the more I realized that we were too late. He’d had too much of it.
I don’t mean mistreatment. I never saw anybody deliberately mistreat Big Boy. In fact, I saw the reverse of that. What I saw was an excess of ‘love.’ Everybody wanted to be with him, to touch him and talk to him; in short, everybody wanted to ‘help’ this big old dolphin. But nobody knew how.
And so, day after day, always smiling but full of rage, the big dolphin banged his head as if to get free again; a stressed out dolphin who was so uncooperative, unpredictable, suspicious and dangerous, a dolphin filled with so much hate that I knew I could never reach him.
It’s a powerful account. The concept of the ‘dump and run’ is particularly upsetting to me, but not at all surprising. The way he talks about it makes it sound like a standard part of the job. I’ve heard about the U.S. Navy doing the same, but it’s a very hard crime to prove.
Keiko only lived a year after leaving the sea pen forever. At the time, critics shouted very loudly about how expensive and pointless the whole endeavour was. But after being plucked from the wild as a baby and being made to perform for more than two decades, he was in dreadful shape.
I think it was a miracle that orca lived five minutes in the wild, and the hard work of those involved with the release laid the foundations for similar projects in the future. All we have to do now is make so much fuss that they can’t ignore us any longer. If we turn up the heat, they won’t be able to keep their cool. That’s the only way things are going to change.
