 How does the captive cetacean industry work? Applications for aqua circus attractions, ie dolphin/orca/beluga shows or swim-with-dolphins programmes, entail getting the relevant local officials on board - a process that takes many months to put into place. So, by the time public meetings occur, deals are, in most cases, already done and dusted – favours accepted, contracts signed and planning applications well under way. So, why have these meetings in the first place? A purely cosmetic exercise to placate the locals and remove any time-delaying obstacles from the proposed aqua circus project. Where do the captive dolphins come from? The vast majority are sourced from the notorious Japanese killing cove of Taiji – a black stain on the planet that quite literally drinks the blood of Atlantis. It is here that young, unmarked dolphins are enslaved into global dolphinaria by gangster overlords. The rest (parents and older, craggier-looking dolphins) are barbarically slaughtered by hammering steel rods through their spines - a heinous act that inflicts a slow and torturous death on those super-intelligent beings rejected by the aqua circus. How quickly is a dolphin made ready for shows? With expert trainers, a basic show can be cobbled together within 6 months. It is achieved by 15-hour days and sleep deprivation … food for thought for all those officials who gave the thumbs-up to this ill-advised venture. What happens to the dolphins’ bodily waste? A dolphin is a mammal, which means – like humans – it discards urine and faeces. In a chlorinated show pool (or ‘concrete box’, as I prefer to call it), the waste is broken down using chemicals – a process which not only demands first-class filtration facilities but also regular and costly pool dumps … the latter regularly dodged by dolphinaria company owners due to high costs, which means that by the time they are forced to act, the water is toxic. So, what happens to this toxic water? It is dumped into the drainage system or the sea … in this instance, your beautiful bay. If the facility, however, is situated in the waters of the bay itself, dolphin waste will flow freely around the area, which could - if tidal movements are limited - affect coral reefs and other aquatic life. And so, to finish - the problems I’ve outlined in this blog are only the tip of the iceberg as I have not dealt with the many injurious effects inflicted on the dolphin performers themselves. Abused, broken Atlanteans, suffering from deep psychological problems, doomed to spend the rest of their days languishing in an alien world. However, I am sorely aware that Atlantean welfare always comes a very poor second to profiteering. Like many ex-trainers, I am not so naïve as to believe that my words will alter the course your elected officials have embarked on. However, I implore all concerned residents to remember this poisonous decision come polling day. Thank you for listening. David Capello – Former Head Trainer
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 Lies, deceit, corruption – to say nothing of cruelty. All facets of the lucrative captive cetacean industry. And I should know, because I was once a big part of it.
So, who am I? I have several pseudonyms, my most popular being ‘Capello’, the most colourful being ‘The Psychic Trainer’. But there is another handle – one I’d rather remain unwritten, as my whistle-blowing return was never intended as self-promotion. Either way, I am the trainer featured in The Perfect Pair Dolphin Trilogy exposé, three books written under the fiction banner to avoid legal problems. A story now described by one discerning reviewer as ‘… fact stranger and more brutal than fiction!’ Yet, incredibly, all events chronicled are true, facts authenticated by original dolphin logbooks, long since thought destroyed. (A common Company practice on the death of a show dolphin.) As you can imagine, my emergence with these logs has severely rattled the conglomerate and animal celebs involved in the story, resulting in a national UK media blackout. A cover-up that appears to have infiltrated the USA, after this award-winning exposé was controversially pulled from an over-subscribed summer reading programme by an unnamed US official. Desperate actions that beg the question, ‘Why are so many organisations, people and – now it would appear – governments so afraid of my story? Why are they so anxious to shut me up?’ Questions that can only be answered by reading the exposé itself. As for me, my involvement with the aqua circus began at the tender age of 17, when I landed what I believed to be my dream job – a naivety that saw me whisked away from family and friends, and deposited in the harsh confines of the UK dolphin training pens; a facility breaking raw dolphins for the commercial dolphinaria. Always held in high esteem, trainers graduating from this establishment were known for being ‘hard-nosed’. Not surprising considering the daily horrors they inevitably witnessed - botched transports that left countless dolphins injured and even maimed. I personally witnessed air burns, a blinding and much, much worse, devastating for the dolphins that survived, because - as my pen colleagues always reminded me - many Atlanteans didn’t. Working the pens was physically and mentally gruelling. Early training was always conducted lying belly down on wet platforms, so we could interact with our dolphin captives eye to eye. Fifteen-hour days were commonplace. Depriving the dolphins of sleep was an important method used to secure the quickfire results that management demanded. It was here that I witnessed my first suicide dolphin – a phenomenon that the captive industry vehemently denies. It was also here where I learned to hand-catch in preparation for transports, veterinary treatments or force-feeds - the latter, horribly distressing. The force-feeds consisted of wrapping disinfected towel gags around the upper and lower jaws of the manually pinned-down dolphins, followed by physically pushing lubricated herring down into their throats to activate their swallowing mechanism. This nightmare was normally performed five fish at a time, punctuated by brief rest periods. Even so, this was not always successful, as the dolphins often vomited back their forced feed. Much worse than the vomiting, however, was the unseen damage inflicted on the dolphins’ psyches, because once they’d undergone this torturous procedure, they were left vulnerable to what many pen trainers refer to as the ‘dolphin mind-set’, a mental condition that, once activated, proves difficult to reverse … suicide by self-starvation. In fact, my only fond memory of the pens was Duchess and Herb’e (Flippa), my beloved Perfect Pair, for it was their brilliance that allowed the three of us to escape that hellhole and head to our first purpose-built dolphinarium. The rest, as they say, is history. Over the next three years, my two magnificent show dolphins took the aqua circus by storm, achieving the much-revered shadow ballet. Their story has been lovingly chronicled by the Holroyds in The Perfect Pair Dolphin Trilogy book series - a warts-and-all exposé that I pray will help bring down this horrendous industry. As for me, once I’d made my decision to walk away from the aqua circus, I was never tempted to return, despite a lucrative offer to train Europe’s then only captive orca. My reason? I viewed my achievements not with pride, but with shame. Nevertheless, despite the attempted cover-up, my experiences are now a documented part of UK dolphinarium history - a tool to shine a light into the sinister and murky world of captive cetaceans. Thanks for listening and thank you, Paul (Protect All Wildlife), for giving me this platform. For more info, visit www.theperfectpairdolphintrilogy.com. David Capello Only together are we strong  Book Review: The Perfect Pair, Book III: Shards from the Mirror
By David C. Holroyd and Tracy J. Holroyd. 2016, Matador Press. In the mid-1950’s, Leon Festinger, an American psychologist, infiltrated a UFO cult. The leader channeled a warning of the end of the world – but the cult’s members would be saved by a flying saucer. When the expected deadline passed, the Earth endured and no saucer materialized, the leader issued a revelation: Their faith changed the aliens’ minds! No Earth cataclysms! The members of the previously media-shy group went out… and began to proselytize. What does this have to do with dolphin-training and Shards from the Mirror, the final volume of David and Tracy Holroyd’s The Perfect Pair trilogy? Oh, plenty! Festinger labeled the mental anguish that comes from holding two mutually-exclusive concepts “cognitive dissonance,” and those two words popped to mind as I read about “David Capello’s” downfall. That was the stage name of an English dolphin trainer who shot to fame in the early 1970’s for his “perfect pair,” two dolphins who performed in flawless synchronization. Because, by the time this book opens, Capello is experiencing growing cognitive dissonance. On one hand, his dolphins’ act wows audiences, makes him famous and makes a lot of money for the entertainment conglomerate he works for. On the other, he knows a concrete tank is no place for dolphins, he’s seen them suffer and die and he’s totally fed-up with bottom-line managers who have no fondness for them. Volume I, The Enchanted Mirror, chronicles how young Capello falls into the job and succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. The first dolphins he meets, Duchess and Herb’e, are not only a perfect pair, but can communicate with him mentally! As its title suggests, The Mirror Cracks recounts not merely Capello’s increasing success as a trainer but his growing frustration with the callous corporate bureaucracy. Particularly troublesome is his general manager Tommy Backhouse, a besuited corporate suck-up more concerned with the dolphinarium’s profits than the welfare of his performers, dolphin or human. Backhouse’s attitude is best summed up by his oft-repeated remark “Anybody with a whistle and a bucket of fish can be a dolphin trainer.” This rather grates on Capello, who not only slaves to make his dolphin show the best in Europe but teaches Scouse, a blind dolphin, to perform using his unique “psychic training” method! Backhouse, who fancies he knows everything about dolphins, isn’t impressed with Capello’s Jedi mind-tricks, and his requested raises (he’s a “presenter,” not a “trainer,” Backhouse reminds him) keep getting denied by the main office. Worse, Backhouse pinches pennies by physically endangering the dolphins, like refusing to dump the dirty tank water, or expecting them to perform to exhaustion. And Capello suspects his boss is just waiting for the right moment to grab all the credit for his achievements. When Shards opens, Capello is wondering if he hasn’t gone too far. He’s thrown his weight around trying to get what his performers need, and now the head office is talking about his mysterious way with dolphins… dolphins who won’t work for anyone else! Even with all this hanging over him, Capello pushes forward, trying to train Duchess and Herb’e to do a double forward somersault. It proves difficult for an unexpected reason: Herb’e gets the trick, but wanting to perform solo, he won’t teach Duchess how it’s done! Duchess, in turn, has started courting Capello, and won’t allow a woman presenter he’s fond of in the pool! And earlier, Capello was freaked by the way his dolphins ignored a dying comrade. These revelations mark Capello’s growing disenchantment with dolphin ethics. As marine mammologists are fond of reminding those of us who have dared read the late Dr. John C. Lilly’s scientifically embargoed books, “Dolphins are not little humans in wet suits!” Like those of us who have been close to them need to be reminded! Once you’re in their environment, they appear quite large, and they’re happy to let you know they are now in charge! Only something as dissociating as knowing you are harming the creatures you love could explain why, when Backhouse gets in his face once too often, Capello grabs a fire hose and blasts the man off his feet, then has to be physically restrained from pushing him into an empty concrete tank. Backhouse, of course, tries to fire Capello, but the head office intervenes, instead transferring their golden-boy trainer to another dolphinarium far from Backhouse’s lair, a place called West Coast, where seemingly nothing ever goes right. Reluctantly preparing to move his pair, Capello recounts one of the book’s strangest scenes. With the dolphins slung in canvas stretchers, the attending veterinarian notices that Duchess has outgrown hers, and he proposes to cut an eye-hole in the fabric to avoid a possible injury. Almost immediately, Duchess starts screaming in Capello’s head, projecting images of blood and pain. When the surgeon pulls out a scalpel and goes to make the cut, Capello, acting as if entranced, slides his hand between Duchess and the blade. Need I say he ends up at the local emergency room, bleeding profusely? The veterinarian, it seems, slipped. What happens next becomes the crux of Capello’s disenchantment with the “magic mirror” of dolphin training. While he and the vet are tending his wound, Backhouse vindictively orders the helpless dolphins placed in an unheated truck on a cold night. When Capello returns two hours later with a few new stitches, he finds to his horror that his dolphins are freezing, and they have shut him out of their minds. Especially Herb’e, who has fled where humans cannot follow, a dark corner of the dolphin psyche that marks a fatal disengagement from life. Having previously dealt with force-feeding other dying dolphins, Capello is determined not to give up on Herb’e, and to restore his perfect pair to their former glory. It takes lavish care and a diagnosis of Herb’e’s illness, a viral infection, to bring the pair back from death’s jaws, and during this interval Scouse worms his way onto Capello’s center stage. Now the trainer must juggle not only human politics but the politics of his dolphins, too! (In defense of dolphins at large, I will ask the reader not to judge them by their behavior in captivity.) In an odd twist of fate, the determined young trainer makes Scouse a star in spite of his disability. The dolphin is eager to perform, and while directing him through mental images, Capello has the bizarre experience of bi-location – of seeing both himself and Scouse performing their act from a remote point of view… By this point, the reader may be granted some skepticism, and rightly so, if the reader has no experience with ESP or dolphins. However, some of us who have are sharing notes and rapidly approaching the conclusion that what Capello calls his “connection” with his dolphins and I call my “telepathy” with Dolly bear striking resemblances that can’t readily be explained by chance alone. It was even investigated by the U.S. military at least 31 years ago, yet it’s still classified! What did they find, and what methods did they use? While I have no ready explanation for this, I am working to make it a recognized phenomenon. In this final volume, Capello at last muses about the dolphin behaviors that have puzzled and infuriated him, something he’s only given passing thoughts to before: What if dolphins view life and death differently from us humans? That would explain why your Atlanteans constantly show indifference when in the presence of a dying colleague – a phenomenon you’ve never been able to get your head around. What if they view their bodies as a mere conveyance – temporary vessels to be discarded when deemed no longer of use? An ethos that could well explain their suicide beachings in the wild. A view of death not as an end, but as a new beginning… in which case, you’ve been totally wrong in your previous evaluation of their attitude… It’s not that they are uncaring; it’s simply that they have a different set of beliefs. Blimey, Capello, what an idiot you’ve been – some expert you turned out to be! As is often the case, dolphins are full of surprises, and Capello, unlike some people, is humble enough to admit it. For a while he’s finally able to concentrate on training the mostly rehabilitated perfect pair for the double forward flip, the culmination of a “shadow ballet” performance that will win them (and their proud trainer) a permanent gold star on the Dolphin Walk of Fame. But he can’t get Herb’e back to his old self, and soon Duchess is battering her former partner and showing an unwelcome interest in teaming up with Scouse for work and play. When his latest request for a raise is rudely refused, Capello realizes he’s being played, that Backhouse and his people have out-maneuvered him. He has two equally repugnant choices, to remain in the sub-par trainer position under the thumb of a man he hates, or to quit and cut his telepathically-trained performers loose with the same man. Reluctantly, he decides to deprogram the dolphins for his inevitable departure. Cognitive dissonance seems to be the inevitable fate of any dolphin trainer stupid enough to care. But the next blow is fatal: bad fish. Not just a few, but a prime supplier sending its good fish to restaurants and the rest to the dolphins, who only rate “animal feed.” This disruption is too much for the barely-recovered Herb’e, and Capello realizes to his shock that his beloved performer is slipping away. When management learns they’re about to lose half their top money-making duo, they do what any sensible executives would do: they throw gas on the flames. They send Backhouse to manage West Coast. The confrontation, as inevitable as a Main Street shootout in an old western movie, takes place with Capello in the water supporting Herb’e, who is clearly on his last legs (pardon the meaningless expression). Distracted, Capello loses track of him, and the dolphin sinks. He somehow drags the 180-kg creature back to the surface, but it’s too late. Shattered, Capello stalks off, leaving Herb’e’s lifeless body for the others to deal with. He makes the last entry in the dolphin’s logbook, and in a final act of defiance, steals all of Herb’e’s logs from the company. But like the inevitable resurrection of an immortal monster in a horror movie, things aren’t quite over yet. Capello goes home, where his dolphin odyssey started four years before with his mother’s innocent suggestion he answer a classified ad. And for several nights, he’s bothered by dreams where he violently attacks the props and scenery at West Coast. And early morning phone calls, which his mother answers, asking what he’s doing there when he’s been banished from all the company’s dolphinariums? The dolphins have apparently taught Capello how to astral project, or create what Tibetan Buddhist monks would call a tulpa – a copy of a person composed of mental energy but capable of acting in the real world. And one last frantic “call” from an agonized Scouse sends him rushing back to West Coast in person, where he finds the dolphin just deceased. A nameless caller later informs Capello that an autopsy showed Scouse was horribly murdered, and that Duchess has followed her partner Herb’e into depression and death. This being a true story, nobody gets what they deserve in the end. Capello goes back to his father’s sign business and tries to forget he ever trained dolphins. Backhouse buys the first dolphins sold by the notorious Taiji drive hunts, and winds up a celebrity dolphin expert and honored naturalist on a popular English TV show. Years later, Capello visits an American uncle who drags him to a dolphin show at the local zoo. Capello reluctantly attends, only to find his fame precedes him: his success with the perfect pair hasn’t been forgotten after all. Capello closes with every ex-dolphin-trainer’s powerful suggestion: Don’t buy a ticket! And now, after four decades of silence, he is sharing this tale with everyone. It is a truly remarkable story as much for his achievements and perseverance as any paranormal content, but my high praise for Capello’s telling of it doesn’t change the fact that, at 350 pages, Shards is not only the longest of the three volumes, but the weakest stylistically. In contrast to the first two books, which open with vivid flashbacks, the beginning of Shards is scattered and unfocused, which leads to confusion about where Capello is and what’s happening. When the narrative finally settles down around page 10 and the paranormal themes emerge, the Holroyds, an unusual brother-sister writing team, seem determined to spin out Capello’s descriptions of his astral encounters by employing every ellipsis (you, know, those three dots…) in the United Kingdom! I know they’re trying to capture the disoriented, shifting feeling of an interspecies mind-meld, but the scene where Capello saves Duchess’s eyesight goes on with ellipsis after ellipsis for four bloody pages, and we get the point, already! I can’t blame the Holroyds too much, because I tried the same literary tactic in my novel Wet Goddess for exactly the same reason, and concluded there were better ways to achieve the same result without annoying the reader. Compared to the first two volumes, Shards feels a bit rushed and padded, in need of some good stiff editing. Perhaps if the Holroyds do another printing, they will consider this suggestion. But in relation to the importance of Capello’s moving and momentous story, this is minor carping. I’m thankful that he’s finally chosen to share his saga to create the perfect pair with us, not only because it validates my own strange experiences, but because we cannot have too much truth about how the dolphin enslavement industry destroys and consumes the self-aware beings it employs. Along with the revelations of Frank Robson and the confessions of Ric O’Barry and John Hargrove, The Perfect Pair trilogy deserves a space on every true dolphin-lover’s bookshelf. (Malcolm J. Brenner is the author of the 2010 novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover and two other books. He lives in Punta Gorda, Fla.)  Book Review: The Perfect Pair, Book II: The Mirror Cracks. By David C. Holroyd and Tracy J. Holroyd. 2014, Matador Press.
Excuse me, I need to calm down. I’ve just finished reading David and Tracy Holroyd’s non-fiction novel The Mirror Cracks, the middle volume of their trilogy The Perfect Pair, and I was startled to be reading pages from my own life. Of course, I’ve had some astonishing, almost unbelievable experiences, but that’s the point. Your opinion may vary, but you’ll be entranced by this story. The books recount one young man’s involvement with the English dolphin enslavement industry in the 1970’s, when small oceanariums were springing up all over the land, when anyone could become a dolphin trainer (and did), but before the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act made dolphin lives expensive, or public opinion in the U.K. made the sorry business illegal. (Would my country showed such compassion, but with the current administration I’m not holding my breath. I’m a writer, not a sperm whale!) Book I, The Enchanted Mirror (reviewed earlier on this news blog) introduced us to “David Capello,” the show name of a man once known as the greatest dolphin trainer in England for having a “perfect pair,” two dolphins who could perform in synchronization. He found them in the first dolphins he met, Duchess and Herb’e, and something more: Capello realized the dolphins could get into his mind and respond to his thoughts. He claims to have trained them telepathically, and before you jump to a conclusion that he’s bullshitting the reader, I’ve had similar things happen to me. So have other people. This type of experience, which almost drove me crazy, is real. And if you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you, so was I! The “enchanted mirror” of the title refers to the glittering reflections on the water surface of Capello’s dolphin training facility, improbably located in an English mining town (all names of places and humans have been changed, the authors say, but not the actual names of the dolphins, as Capello wanted to honor them). Book I introduced us to Capello, a common sort of lad thinking about joining the family sign-painting business when the allure of dolphins beckoned in a classified ad. He responded, and due to a combination of hard work, talent, and sometimes sheer luck (not to mention other people getting fired), Capello soon found himself the lead trainer ¬– and then the only trainer ¬– for the three dolphin shows owned by the vast, unnamed entertainment conglomerate he worked for. His boss, a corporate sycophant named Backhouse, keeps telling Capello “Anyone with a whistle and a bucket of fish can be a trainer,” thus disparaging not only all Capello’s hard work but his dolphins’ too! Once all the dolphins were trained, Backhouse said, the show could be run by “presenters,” who work for less. Worse yet, Capello’s charges (he thinks of them as his dolphins) have to swim in a cesspool half the time because the filter in their pool isn’t up to the task. Dumping the water is a costly corporate no-no, but when his dolphins’ skins start peeling, Capello does what he has to, muttering “Screw the establishment!” while he pulls the plug. In spite of this, at the end of Book I things were going swimmingly for Capello, his perfect pair and another pair of unlikely performing dolphins. Then Bonnie and Clyde were shipped in, to board at Capello’s pool until their new oceanarium was completed. They were the imperfect pair, two show veterans who already knew where all the humans’ buttons are and how to push them. Capello is able to win Bonnie over, but Clyde is a serious problem. He seems to be receiving his trainer’s mental commands, but not responding to them, and he radiates a cold contempt for show business. During one memorable performance, Capello throws out several rings, which the dolphins are supposed to fetch on their snouts. Clyde, instead, elects to use his penis. The arrival of this pair doesn’t so much change things as it marks a stress point in Capello’s career. He finds his telepathic method effective with his dolphins, but the concentration required leaves him exhausted. Dealing with Backhouse and the bureaucracy he represents is so frustrating that Capello turns to valium, which affects his connection, as he calls it, with Duchess and Herb’e. And while his staff are being whittled down, he’s constantly being called to do more with less, and put out fires at other oceanariums, with trainers far less talented than he. When David is ordered to send his backup team to another pool, he snaps. They are Baby, a talented juvenile, and Scouse, a dolphin accidentally blinded by bashing his head on this plywood shipping crate. Fuming with rage, he does it, only to find Scouse still mentally calling him from 100 miles away! This so closely resembles my own experience with my dolphin lover that I freaked out when I read it. I’m sure other dolphin trainers have felt this, but no-one other than Capello has had the courage to write frankly about it! Slowly, Capello’s little empire begins to crumble, and he is forced to acknowledge that the dolphins he’s trained with his own sweat and tears aren’t his. The realization seems to break him, but as one of the characters in Book I told him, “Dolphinariums don’t just break dolphins, they break people too.” A woman presenter is attracted to him, but he’s too busy to give her the attention she deserves. And then the seemingly inevitable happens: Duchess, his favorite dolphin, starts courting him! Being a normal sort of guy, Capello doesn’t fall for this the way I did, but he finds it startling. Fortunately for him, he’s able to thwart her advances. The final scenes find Capello struggling with prescription drug addiction, hating his unfeeling manager, and more dolphins arriving to winter-over at the already crowded training facility. He rallies, only to hear that Scouse has quit working, and nobody can get him to perform… Capello has become indispensable, but the Company doesn’t realize it, and his request for a raise is turned down. The only thing keeping him working is his devotion to his perfect pair. He cannot abandon them to a cold, hard world run by bean-counters, where the dolphins he loves are merely replaceable pawns in a vast game of riches. Throughout this story, the Holroyds keep you turning pages. Their writing is tight and concise, but also supple and emotional. Capello’s thoughts and feelings are expressed clearly, and so are those of his performers. “The Perfect Pair” trilogy should be REQUIRED READING for anyone even daydreaming about becoming a marine animal trainer. The heartbreak and hard work of this career are made palpable here, more so than the joys and excitement that marked Book I. By the end of The Mirror Cracks, Capello, resurrected, has become a tougher, shrewder personality, and so have his dolphins. Stay tuned for Book III, Shards from the Mirror. The truth will prevail!  CliBook Review: The Perfect Pair, Book I: The Enchanted Mirror. By David C. Holroyd and Tracy J. Holroyd. 2012, Matador Press.
Being a dolphin trainer looks like a glamorous job, as Ric O’Barry could tell you. He trained dolphins for the mid-1960’s TV show Flipper, which was dubbed into dozens of languages and became a world-wide hit. Rightly or wrongly, O’Barry now blames himself for the current plague of dolphin exploitation, including the proliferation of swim-with-dolphin facilities and oceanariums that are pillaging wild populations. In reality, dolphin-training is a difficult, demanding, often-dangerous job that is guaranteed to break your heart. The “why” becomes obvious in The Enchanted Mirror, the first book in a trilogy chronicling the career of one “David Capello,” the stage name of a dolphin trainer who worked for an unnamed entertainment company in 1970’s England. Is the book fiction or a memoir? I’m not quite clear. The foreword writer describes it as “a true story,” but co-author Tracy Holroyd, who wrote it with her brother David, told me they fictionalized Capello’s story for legal reasons (like I did with my human-dolphin love novel Wet Goddess). Does it matter? No, because his story reflects what former trainers like O’Barry and SeaWorld’s John Hargrove have revealed about the job. We open with Capello in the middle of a performance with Duchess and Herb’e, his “perfect pair,” two dolphins who can synchronize their moves flawlessly, and we find that he’s directing them by… thinking? Flashback to Capello, a callow 17-year-old, hearing his mom suggest he apply as an assistant at a dolphin show. Although disinterested, he somehow gets the job and goes to work at a training facility, improbably located in a grimy coal-mining town. The first reality Capello encounters is unwanted animals: a pair of messy penguins and a dangerous sea lion. He gets so friendly with the pinniped that, after a drunken binge, he ends up sleeping in its cage! When confronted by an irate local whose parking space he’s taken, Capello experiences weirdness: the sea lion comes to his defense. “For the oddest moment,” he relates, “it seemed as though I were looking in a mirror; then I felt all my aggression seeping away and saw it – actually saw it – filling up those big green eyes.” This is the first time he experiences what he calls a connection with other species, and when the first pair of dolphins show up for training, the feeling is amplified. “Aren’t you beautiful? I thought. I reached out and, as my hand made contact with this strangely different creature of the sea, my nervy excitement began to dissipate, leaving in its wake a sense of peace and calm. I felt something: a connection of some kind that made me feel light-headed. It was as if she was stealing my strength, leaving me feeling weak and disoriented, yet I couldn’t break free of her spell. I was totally and utterly captivated. “This animal was giving off some serious vibes.” Here, Capello joins a very select group of humans, including me, O’Barry, New Zealand trainer Frank Robson, former U.S. Navy scientist Michael Greenwood and a few others who claim to have been touched by the dolphins in a remarkable way: mentally. But let us leave this improbability momentarily to continue Capello’s story. By this point all the major forces are in play which will, I suspect, sustain the story through three volumes. Capello rapidly becomes very possessive of Duchess and Herb’e, thinking of them as his dolphins, when in reality they belong to the megalithic company that issues his paychecks. The fact that other trainers can’t get them to perform makes no difference. Young, hard-working and sometimes just dumb lucky, Capello soon finds himself running the dolphin training operation and confronting all the problems which the commoditization and exploitation of sentient non-human species creates. When the “perfect pair” aren’t up to performing eight shows on holidays, a second team of dolphins must be imported, one of whom turns out to have been traumatized in capture. Capello describes in agonizing detail the enormous stress of capturing her twice a day and trying to force-feed her. When the filtration system can’t handle the amount of waste in the water, he risks the wrath of management by dumping the tank and refilling it. When the show finally opens to the public, a woman trainer steals the limelight by disrobing for the cameras of the Fleet Street tabloids… and so on. During all this time, Capello also recounts the colorful and sometimes creepy people he roomed with. He recalls his work as a trainer so clearly and vividly that I wonder if he kept a private journal, or had copies of the individual dolphins’ logbooks to work from. Capello ends The Enchanted Mirror with himself ascendant, Duchess and Herb’e working as the perfect pair and a second duo, including one unfortunate dolphin blinded in shipping, as back-up performers. He feels on top of the world until he learns that a third pair of dolphins are being sent to him for training... a couple ominously known as Bonnie and Clyde. Stand by for Vol. II: The Mirror Cracks. Fiction it may (or may not) be, The Perfect Pair is one of the best and most authentic books I’ve ever read about the realities of dolphin training. The Holroyd siblings manage to convey all the aspects of the job, be they boring, funny, horrifying or wonderful. Although their writing is very good, I had a couple of minor quibbles. While most of the story is told in past tense it occasionally shifts into present tense, Capello talking to himself during the more extreme chapters. Tracy Holroyd described this as a deliberate technique to engage the reader, but I found it disconcerting. Also, a disturbing scene of some poltergeist-like nocturnal activity in the oceanarium raises questions that aren’t answered in this volume. Historically, tales involving human-dolphin interaction don’t end well for the dolphins. This goes all the way back to Pliny the Elder, who in the 1st Century CE wrote in amazement of a dolphin who visited the now-Tunisian city of Hippo Diarrhytus. Alas, the creature’s friendly nature attracted many wealthy visitors. “At last, the vexations that were caused them by having to entertain so many influential men who came to see this sight, compelled the people of Hippo to put the animal to death,” Pliny wrote. So, while I have a dark feeling about how the Holroyds’ telling of Capello’s tale will end, fascination and professional interest compel me to continue. Ignorance is not bliss, particularly when you’ve gotten as close to one of these creatures as I have. And what about that mysterious feeling of “connection” that Capello describes, the ability to train and direct dolphins with his mind? This is one of those things that gets discussed in back rooms at marine mammal conferences. A lot of trainers report it; I know, because I’ve spoken to some. Scientists generally dismiss telepathy and other such paranormal phenomena as preposterous notions, the product of superstition or delusions. Well, I may have been stoned when I was communicating with my dolphin, Dolly, but I’m not stupid. I doubted the experiences at the time and thought I was literally going crazy later on, but it turns out I wasn’t: I’m not the only one who’s had a dolphin get into his mind. I can’t begin to explain how they do it, but consider this: We humans have been in our present form on Earth, Homo sapiens, for about 150,000 years. That’s not even a blink in time. Dolphins, on the other hand, have been in their present form for at least 12 million years, or 80 times longer than we have. They not only have a vast history of survival, but they’ve been self-aware all that time and able to explore their consciousness. Isn’t it possible they’ve figured out some things about mind and the nature of reality that we haven’t? The Perfect Pair will give you one man’s insight into their world as he encountered it, but if you find yourself buying the whole trilogy, don’t say I didn’t warn you! (Malcolm J. Brenner is the author of the 2010 novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover and two other books. He lives in Punta Gorda, Fla.) |
David c holroyd & tracy j holroydArchives
February 2019
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