The Cove Page #6

I go first with the thermal camera.

I can tell if there's

any movement over there.

If they're hiding in the bushes,

they're going to be popping out.

So the hydrophone was

sort of a trial run

to see if we could get away with it.

You guys go in with two cameras, right?

Three cameras.

The second mission,

what we call the full orchestra.

Let's go, then, with three cameras...

you're 2, you're 1...

and think about fourth.

We would plant all the rocks,

the hydrophones, underwater cameras.

They have scuba divers,

so they just sweep.

They're straining the bottom of that bay,

so we don't want them to

pick up underwater cameras.

Once you get right here, you're safe.

This is the first sign

that says "Do not enter."

- We don't know what it says.

- "Danger."

We have no idea.

It says "Welcome to Taiji"

for all we know.

"Enjoy our wonderful UNESCO site."

I wanted to have

a three-dimensional experience

with what's going on in that lagoon.

I wanted to hear everything

that the dolphins were doing,

everything that the whalers were saying.

The effort wasn't just

to show the slaughter.

You want to capture something

that will make people change.

This weekend, the thin, mournful cry

of the humpback whale

echoed through London's

Trafalgar Square,

as thousands of demonstrators

demanded an end to all whale killing.

In the 1960s,

when the IWC wasn't doing anything

about the slaughter of large whales,

there was one guy, Roger Payne,

who helped start the whole

Save the Whale movement

by exposing to the world

that these animals were singing.

That was profound.

What do we want?

Save the whales!

When do we want it?

Save the Whale demonstrators

were out again today.

And they are determined to see

that something be done about it.

At the time, about 33,000 whales

a year were being killed.

We got it down eventually

to about 330, 1% of that amount.

It's now going back up again.

There has to be a new generation

that takes over from here.

There's only so many Ric O'Barrys

and Roger Paynes.

They're all in their 60s and 70s now,

and there's not a lot

of people out there

picking up where they've left off.

I like this.

It sinks very slowly, this line.

It does sink, but it's very slow,

so I just put a couple weights on it.

We're going to have these two

hydrophones connected to it.

- One thing, though.

- Yeah.

I took all the other stickers off, see?

Go on the...

"Please return dry."

Yeah, let's take the sticker off.

Okay? Jesus.

(03) 3224-5000.

That's the cell phone number

for the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo

as well as the cell phone numbers

of our other two phones,

just in case something shits the bed.

When we very discreetly

leave the hotel room

with four or five guys

dressed in black

with camera equipment,

we have it timed really well.

We know when the guard turns up.

We know how far the cop

is going to be behind us.

We know how long

it takes the cops

to get from the next village there.

It was probably

the scariest night of my life

because we'd been up

many days in a row

preparing for this.

We're exposed out there.

There's very few places we could hide.

Joe.

Here you go.

Come on. Let's go. Go.

Holy Christ.

Nice work.

Jesus.

It's a good night.

That's a good night.

Me?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Not me.

At midnight, I'm sleeping.

I don't know.

I cannot speak for OPS.

I can only speak for Ric O'Barry.

I cannot speak

for anybody except myself.

At midnight, I'm sleeping.

No, no, no.

I don't know.

I'm not OPS.

I'm not OPS, no.

Well, I do interviews.

Anybody who wants to talk to me,

- I will talk to them.

- Yes?

OPS wants to talk to me,

I talk to them.

I talk to anybody

about mercury poisoning.

- Thank you.

- Okay.

Thank you so much for your time.

- Bye-bye.

- Bye-bye.

I think the most horrifying thing

about the whole dive that night

was that, you know,

you could hear them

communicating with each other,

and you knew that that next morning

that would be the end of it.

They'd be silenced forever.

They're always trying

to communicate with us,

and that's hard to explain,

but when you live with them

like I did on the Flipper TV show

day and night,

I could read that body language.

There's something visceral

about being in the water

with an animal like this.

As a scientist,

I'm trained to recognize intelligence

through objective measures...

tool use, cognitive processes,

and so on.

As a human being,

when I see a dolphin looking at me

and his eyes tracking me

and I lock eyes with that animal,

there's a human response

that makes it undeniable

that I'm connecting

with an intelligent being.

Science has been tantalized for years

at the prospect of talking

to the most intelligent

creatures on earth,

which may not be human beings.

A small group of scientists

determined to see

if humans and dolphins

can learn to talk to each other.

We keep spending billions of dollars

for sending signals up into the sky,

and we have a species here

that can conceivably be

more intelligent than we are.

Dolphins can understand

how to manipulate situations,

how to relate to people,

how to create innovatively

out of their own imagination.

It sometimes amazes me

that the only language

which has been extensively

taught to dolphins

is a version of

American Sign Language,

which, of course,

you use your hands,

so you have

all these wonderful signals,

and people use their hands

to give messages to dolphins.

And this somehow

kind of misses the point

because dolphins don't have hands,

so this is inherently

a very one-way process.

And it's this anthropomorphic

"We have something

to teach them or control them,"

and perhaps we ought to be looking

at what they can give to us.

It's not about intelligence.

It's about consciousness.

They are self-aware,

like humans are self-aware.

That means that we look in the mirror,

and we know exactly

what we're looking at.

I don't believe that the fishermen

here are aware of that.

When they're in that killing cove

and their babies are being

slaughtered in front of them,

they're aware of that.

They can anticipate

what's going to happen to them.

The first time I went to Taiji

was in 1980,

and I had been to Iki the year before.

Iki is a tourist destination for Japanese

which became infamous

for this... most ghastly

slaughters of dolphins.

I mean, literally thousands of them

would... could be killed in a day.

Well, I went back to Iki

about three years ago,

and they don't have any dolphins,

where once they had thousands of them

streaming by the coast.

Irony of ironies.

Because the international

captivity trade is so lucrative,

they want to be in on it,

and they don't have any dolphins.

They have to have dolphins

for their dolphin parks,

so they go buy them in Taiji now.

Every cetacean known to man

is endangered

just by going anywhere near Japan.

We asked the Taiji fishermen

if we could subsidize this activity...

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