KEY POINTS:
I always thought I knew where I stood on the question of marine parks with performing dolphins. Like many issues for people living in the People's Republic of Grey Lynn, it's pretty straightforward.
Obama good; Bush bad. Hybrid car good; bicycle better. Marine park evil; open sea dolphin
watching saintly. But recently while I was in Tahiti, I visited the Moorea Dolphin Centre.
It's a part of the Intercontinental Resort where I was staying, so the opportunity was there. I justified it to myself that the dolphins were in a state-of-the-art enclosure and my itinerary didn't allow time to go off on a sea-going dolphin-watching experience.
Whatever. I just wanted to get up close to one of these amazing mammals. There were six of us wanting to get into the water with the dolphins - a French mum and her two kids who went off with one trainer, and me and a young German couple who were with the English-speaking trainer, Yann.
He gave us a spiel about dolphins, where they fitted into the evolutionary scheme of things and offered loads of interesting factoids. He explained there were strict conditions under which the dolphins performed - a maximum of six people in the water; if they didn't want to perform, they didn't have to and a maximum of two-and-a-half hours of human contact a day.
Then he introduced us to Aito, a 27-year-old US Navy veteran. Aito was one of the team involved in finding mines under the sea, but, on one mission, he was frightened by a boat and lost his bearings. He was eventually found, but he'd lost a third of his body weight and was covered in shark bites.
Aito suffered a crisis of confidence about venturing into open sea and was retired to the Dolphin Centre in 1996.
He was a very cool dolphin - responding to commands, patient with the three of us who were stroking him, hugging him and generally oohing and ahing all over him.
He looked to be in good nick. Well fed, bright-eyed, fleet of fin. And yet, while I could understand Aito choosing a safe environment, surely other dolphins would rather be in the ocean?
Yann, the head dolphin keeper, offered a different perspective. He told me that while there were a few good eco tourism operators, many were doing terrible harm to the dolphin population.
It boils down to money - doesn't it always? If an operator has a boat-load of paying punters, they want to see dolphins. Worldwide, the industry has become crowded and where you have many operators competing for ever-decreasing dollars, they'll do whatever they can to ensure the humans go home happy - and bugger the best interests of the dolphins.
They will push dolphins into bays to force them closer to their crafts. They'll put food out so the dolphins will hang alongside the boat. According to Yann given a choice, animals will go with the easy option every time when it comes to food gathering.
If some guy is tossing barrel-loads of fish over the side, what's a hungry dolphin to do? And Yann told me that means many calves are increasingly losing the ability to hunt - in effect, becoming a fast-food generation of dolphins.
So when an operator doesn't show up - the weather might be bad, or there might not be enough customers, or the business might have gone bust - and a pod of dolphins has become accustomed to being fed regularly over the years, they're in trouble.
They also lose their instinctive wariness and can be preyed on by unscrupulous commercial fishermen.
I asked him whether the dolphins liked it at the Centre. He was resolutely anti anthropomorphic. "We don't know," he replied honestly. He tapped Aito on the head. "There's a whole lot going on in there, that we'll never understand. All I do know is that he's in good physical condition; he's alert and responds well to the trainers, and our dolphins are living well beyond the average age of dolphins in the wild.
"If people insist on interacting with dolphins," he said, "then let them come to supervised facilities where dolphins know what's expected and are rewarded accordingly and leave the wild dolphins alone."
He's got a point. In our quest for the most "authentic", the most "real" experience we can have, we're turning the animal world into an artificial one and in doing so, we're putting the animals we love in danger.
* www.kerrewoodham.com
