Vancouver Sun, Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Nicholas Read

Spinnaker is the Vancouver Aquarium's lone Pacific white-sided dolphin.

Vancouver Aquarium president John Nightingale believes a lease he negotiated with the Vancouver park board in 1998 will allow him to continue placing dolphins in the aquarium, regardless of whether the current board votes to halt the practice.

On Monday night, the board was scheduled to hear a delegation of speakers, led by the Coalition for No Whales in Captivity, calling for a comprehensive ban on importing whales and dolphins into Stanley Park.

Nightingale refused to say what he would do if the board voted to implement such a ban, but said the aquarium's current lease -- which expires on Jan. 1, 2014 -- allows him to continue bringing in whales and dolphins until then, providing they were not obtained from the wild or, if they were, that they were not caught after September 1996.

"Our view is that we have a lease, a memorandum of agreement [with the park board] and a bylaw all to that effect," Nightingale said. "All three are a match.

"If the park board is going to change something, it's going to be quite a process."

The lease was negotiated after a previous NPA-dominated park board and the aquarium responded to public complaints in 1996 about capturing whales and dolphins for public display.

Nightingale wishes to import two to three more Pacific white-sided dolphins to join the aquarium's existing dolphin, Spinnaker, in the facility's Wild Coast exhibit. Spinnaker was obtained from a Japanese aquarium in 2001.

But Vancouver Councillor Tim Lewis, who voted to ban importing whales and dolphins while he was a park board commissioner, said he believes the passing of a new bylaw would mean an end to more dolphins and whales in the park, regardless of what Nightingale says.

"If what the aquarium is saying is correct, then any city council could bind the hands of all future city councils simply by entering into a contract with a third party never to amend bylaws," Lewis said.

"It's very clear that no one council or park board can ever tie the hands of a future council or park board."

Park board vice-chair Anita Romaniuk said the board would not vote for any kind of ban without gauging public opinion first.

She said while she and other members of the current COPE-dominated board personally oppose keeping whales and dolphins in captivity, none would act without first asking staff for a way to measure public feeling on the issue.

"We would certainly not be guided by our own personal opinion, but would try to gauge what public opinion on this is," Romaniuk said.

Lewis was one of 14 people scheduled to speak against keeping whales and dolphins in captivity at the board's last public meeting before a summer recess.

"Putting a dolphin in a concrete box is inhumane, cruel and, perhaps most of all, it sends the wrong message to the thousands of children that witness it every year," he said. "The message being that we as one species on this planet can dominate and control other species without any negative impact on ourselves."

Nightingale rejected that saying: "Whales and dolphins, in this case Pacific white-sided dolphins, are an integral part of what makes the aquarium a compelling place to visit, and they're vital in turning on people's awareness and curiosity."

Coalition spokeswoman Annelise Sorg said the then park board asked the aquarium in 1996 to phase out whales in captivity, but the aquarium refused and negotiated what she calls an importation "loophole."

Now she wants the current board to correct the situation and impose a wholesale ban.

She was supported by World Society for the Protection of Animals spokesman Ric O'Barry, who trained the five dolphins that collectively appeared as Flipper in the classic 1960s TV series.

He quit training dolphins, he said, when all five animals died from stress-related illnesses induced by captivity.

"Our primary sense is light; not so with Spinnaker," O'Barry said. "Spinnaker's primary sense is sonar. They use their sonar for identifying and catching fish and navigating.

"He's not catching any fish, so he's deprived of his primary sense. That's sensory deprivation and that's a form of abuse."

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