... EVERY KID IN AMERICA FOR GENERATIONS IS IN LOVE WITH FLIPPER I WONDER IF YOU WOULD TELL US ABOUT YOUR EARLY EXPERIENCES AND WHAT HAPPENED WITH KATHY AND HOW THAT SET YOU ON THE ROAD THAT YOU'RE ON NOW.Oh boy, that one won't go away. Yeah, well- you have to understand, we didn't have the information in the 1960s that we have today. Today we know that only three things are killing these dolphins - our pollution, our fishing nets and our captivity. I didn't know that in the 1960s. I was - you have to remember I was probably the highest paid animal trainer in the world during that period. And it's very easy to lull yourself into complacency when you're getting a new Porsche every year and you know, just living a great life style and have your blinders on. To be perfectly blunt, I was as ignorant as I could be for as long as I could be.And it wasn't until Cathy died of suicide, what I would say, and I say that word with great trepidation and the lack of - I don't know what else to call it. But you probably know that dolphins and whales are not automatic air breathers. Every breath they take is a conscious effort. So they can end their life whenever they want to and that's what Cathy did. She chose to not take that next breath and you have to call that suicide, self-induced asphyxiation in a steel tank at the ... Aquarium.Well that's why I'm so opposed to tanks. We don't need tanks. WE could have moved her into a natural lagoon. It's infinitely less expensive. You only need to run a fence across the mouth of a lagoon. You don't need a filter system, you don't need to refrigerate the water. But the veterinarians and the scientists and the trainers all have to have control and so they moved them from tank to tank for marketing reasons. But Flipper died in captivity, to get back to your question and that's the thing that turned me around. That was on Earth Day 1970 coincidentally. That was the first Earth Day.CAN YOU TALK ABOUT IT?Yeah I got a phone call from the Seaquarium telling me she was not doing well. I had already left. The show was over. We lived together for 7 years. The Flipper house at the Seaquarium is still there. That was really my home. The actors didn't live there, they lived elsewhere. So I lived with them 24 hours a day 7 days a week and we bonded, very close with them. Well one day it was all over. You know, the wheels fell off. It was a wrap, that's it. The costumes go back in the trunk, the props go back in the prop locker and we were all separated. And some of them were sold off to traveling shows in Europe. The Octoberfest going on in Germany.Cathy was put in a steel tank in isolation and she committed suicide there. And a lot of them do that. There's a lot of dolphins who have died in captivity the same way but you'll never know it because the veterinarian fills out the report and sends it to the National Marine Fishery Services. This is called the marine mammal inventory report. The National Marine Fishery Service don't do anything with this information. It just sits there. They don't even know what it means. It may mean that captivity doesn't even work. They don't know. It's just a big bureaucratic mess. So the system doesn't work, to make a long story short. It doesn't work.SO YOU ...That's hard to do. Yeah boy that's really hard to talk about that. I don't like thinking about that.READ IT ..FROM YOUR BOOK?I don't think I could read it. It's really very difficult. I remember going out there that day and it was a very hot day. There was no shade at all and I hadn't seen her - well - so I approached the tank which was about this level here and she was on the other side. She had blisters this size from the sun. She was black from sunburn because she spent most of her time on the surface of the water. Her fin was bent just like Keiko's. That's why they're bent, gravity. That's nature saying there's something wrong here. Try going under water when there's no gravity.And so she swam over and looked me right in the eye, took a breath, and just held it. Just held it. Well so I grabbed her like this and she sank to the bottom of the tank. I let her go and she sank. I jumped in and pulled her to the surface. She committed suicide. The tank - the tank is a bad thing. It's the killing tanks.So that's why I'm an abolitionist.Thanks but no tanks, that's the message. 
