Richard O'Barry > Quotes

“A dolphin's smile is the greatest deception. It creates the illusion that they're always happy.”
― Richard O'Barry

“The slaughter of dolphins and other marine mammals is no more horrible than captive dolphins performing tricks because it's not just dolphins were talking about, it's also people. Especially children [...] The effect is devastatingly the same because millions of people every year who watch and cheer this spectacle of dominance are in some way also cheering every other form of environmental ravishment. If dolphin is a reference point in our relationship with nature, then when we teach people that it's okay to abuse dolphins, we're teaching them that it's also okay to abuse the rest of nature.”
― Richard O'Barry, To Free a Dolphin

“There's an exact moment for leaping into the lives of wild animals. You have to feel their lives first, how they fit the world around them. It's like the beat of music. Their eyes, the sounds they make, their head, movements, their feet and their whole body, the closeness of things around them - all this and more make up the way they perceive and adjust to their world.”
― Richard O'Barry

“Dolphins work on the reward system,” I explained. “When they’ve had enough to eat, that’s a wrap.” I shrugged.
The director eyed me with a frown, and I realized that he was playing a role himself, the role of the stereotypical director. Hollywood is full of them. Bald-headed, short, and heavyset, he had a white moustache and goatee, an electric megaphone, and—of all things—a gold cigarette holder with a 100 mm filter cigarette in it. The only part of his costume missing was a pith helmet, which was probably optional. “Hmmmm,” he said as though musing to himself, “like actors, then.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins

“Later, I talked with Doug Trumbull, a Hollywood director now but then a special-effects man for the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He had looked me up because he was interested in interspecies communication. Since my career had been devoted to dolphins and the problems of communicating with them, I was one of a number of people Doug was questioning about how we might relate to creatures intelligent but totally different from us. I didn’t know which movie he was working on then—I got the impression it was about an airplane—but when I saw Close Encounters, which is about man’s first contact with an alien intelligence, I realized what we had been talking about.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins

“I'm fighting now only for individual captive dolphins and dolphins in general but also for people, for the mind and sensibilities of future generations toward the world itself.”
― Richard O'Barry, To Free a Dolphin

“He got up, came back, and unlocked the door to my cell, then led me back to his desk and indicated the bench along the wall. I sat down, and he pushed a bundle of letters over to me. I was reading one of the letters—it was from a young girl who said she loved Flipper and wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help either Charlie Brown or me—when suddenly Sgt. Pepper grabbed my hair and banged my head twice—Bang! Bang!—against the wall. Through clenched teeth he growled, “You come here to steal dee fish! You bess tell me de trut, man. You come to steal dee fish!”
“Dolphins are not fish!” I yelled back at him.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins

“Communication is not about the sender or receiver; it's about the sending. And that's done with language.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins

“Around the world, about a thousand dolphins are held in captivity, while millions have been killed in purse seine tuna nets and drift nets. Tens of thousands of others have been "sacrificed" in the name of scientific research, some marine mammals merely to find out what they've been eating.”
― Richard O'Barry, To Free a Dolphin

“I've seen all kinds of things done to dolphins in my travels around the world, but I have never seen anything as horrible as this dolphin drive hunt in Taiji.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins

“There is a blackout in media coverage of issues concerning whales and dolphins in Japan, with the exception of the government's viewpoint. It is simply amazing how little good information (and how much bad information) the public in Japan gets about the worldwide controversy over whaling and dolphin killing, all because the media bows to the wishes of the Japan Fisheries Agency.”
― Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin Smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins