The Last Dolphin
First Published in the New Zealand Herald Canvas Magazine December 15 2007 by Michele Hewitson.
Kelly passed away on 11 September 2008.
Marineland in Napier looks the way you think a childhood memory or a postcard from the 1970s should look. It is sea blues, washed out from the summer sun; Pohutukawa trees in bloom.
It smells of fishy wharves and sea salt and wet togs; of ice cream. People are friendly here. “i know we’re a bit fishy smelling here at Marineland, but we’re friendly. Ask us anything and if we know the answer we’ll tell you, and if we don’t we’ll make it up,” says Amanda Milne, keeper and retail manager, smiling and waving at the crowd from the stage behind the dolphin pool. We in the grandstand wave back and smile. The last dolphin in captivity in the country grins, or we like to think it does.
“Did you know?” quizzes a sign on the side of the pool, “that dolphins have no sense of smell?” no, i didn’t. i also didn’t know that in human years, Kelly, the last dolphin in captivity in new Zealand, is 160 years old. i suspect them of having made this up.
The dolphin grins, as we think dolphins do.
in the old days, the keepers wore red shorts, red shirts and bright white socks, up to the knees. They look, in the photographs, as they had been imported from a Butlin’s holiday camp. a Miss New Zealand worked at Marineland. She added a bit of glamour.
The Queen came, with the duke. Derek Nimmo came, so did Rolf Harris and Belinda Todd.
Nobody would come here now for a photo op. in the files at the museum at Napier is a photo. “Zara the dolphin zooms down the side of Napier’s Marineland pool yesterday towing [in a little boat] four-year-old Michelle Robson, daughter of dolphin trainer, Mr Bruce Robson.” The date is March 30, 1966.
The dolphins used to wear funny paper party hats. “We wouldn’t do that now,” says Gary Macdonald, Marineland’s manager. He started here in 1972. He was on the boat the day the last two dolphins, Shona and Kelly, were caught, on December 13, 1974. Did he think now it was demeaning to put silly hats on animals? “No, they looked cute. They didn’t know they looked silly.” While we are having this conversation, a man has come to paint the Christmas decorations on Marineland’s front windows: a seal and a dolphin, cavorting, and “they’ve put hats on them! Oh my God!” says Macdonald.
He is a thoughtful man, a kind man, who is a pragmatist. He has heard everything that has been said about Marineland before.
He wept “of course I did” when Shona, the second-to-last Marineland dolphin, died on April 7, 2006. He always thought Kelly would die first. He had drawn up a plan, made arrangements to have the last dolphin euthanized, if it came to that, if she pined so badly her life wasn’t worth living. He says, “Some people think the songs of the humpback whales contain the history of time, [something] like Homer’s Iliad.” He doesn’t know; this could be true but probably isn’t. He thinks dolphins do have an empathy with humans, or some humans. Or it could be that this is an extension of the empathy humans have for dolphins. “Which is amazing after all the things we’ve done to them.” He doesn’t think, surely, that they have some sort of collective memory of the things humans have done? Of course not, he says, and laughs at such silliness.
He has heard it all before.
He keeps an old clipping from a science journal pinned to his office wall. The headline: Hedgehog’s Brain More Complex Than Dolphin’s. An excerpt: “It is not true that they [dolphins] are by nature especially friendly to humans.” That is one of Macdonald’s little tricks. Marineland, like memory, plays tricks. People who were last here as children say, “What happened to the killer whale?” There never was a killer whale. They say, “What happened to the stingray?” There never was a stingray. There was a drainhole cover with a pipe that looked, if you squinted in the right way, with the summer sun in your eyes, a bit like a stingray. People get quite aggressive about these memories being challenged. They want to believe what they thought they remembered about Marineland. This is what I will remember about Marineland. Makea the Californian sea lion came out and did a behavior which was praying to the big sea lion in the sky for sun. And the sun came out.
REGAN BECKETT, the senior keeper, came here at the age of 15 as a volunteer and is still here 23 years later.
“I’m not really a water person,” he says. His mum was one of the ticket office ladies; his dad had a cattery. Most of the staff began as volunteers. Macdonald gets letters all the time: “I want to come and work at Marineland because I love animals.” He is never snooty about this because, when you think about it, that is a very good qualification for wanting to work with animals.
When you work with animals you must not call what they do “tricks.” They are behaviors.
“What we ask the animals to do are natural behaviors,” says Beckett. He has a whistle called a bridge which works like a high frequency dog whistle. When the trainers want Kelly to do the behaviour ” which is lying on her back and swimming ” they are encouraging her, with a reward of a fish, to do a behavior which, in the wild, is designed to dislodge parasites. She will also, sometimes, do an unnatural behavior which is mimicking another species of dolphin, the spinner.
Bottlenose dolphins are supposed to be easier to train; common dolphins like Kelly have been regarded as difficult. The bottlenoses, says Macdonald, are like Flipper and “they’re bigger, stronger, more agile and probably quicker on the uptake.” He was told the common couldn’t be trained. “They’re supposed to be flighty and fragile animals and, to be honest, the early years probably reflected that.” There was no manual on how to train a dolphin when Macdonald started. He could, no doubt, write one now, but there would be little demand. But here is how you train a common dolphin to do a spinner dolphin behavior. “The spinning is a trained behavior for Kelly. The spinners do it naturally and very high. Common dolphins need to be taught how to do it. Once they do, they seem to enjoy it, though. How do you train it? The dolphin sits in front of you (in the water, of course) and you use their pectoral flippers to gently turn them around. Reward (fish) and repeat and after a while the dolphin will do a spin on its own.
Then you put it to a signal and, using your hand as a target (for the dolphin to touch), you get it to spin while lifting itself. It takes a while, but this is what I mean by starting simple and developing from there.” Dolphins can be trained to do entirely unnatural behaviors, like leaping out of the water on to a stage. Kelly doesn’t do this.
Macdonald doesn’t like to see dolphins doing it: it is like watching a fish out of water.
On our first day in sunny Napier, at Marineland where the murals behind the stage show memories of summer childhoods, washed out sea blues and Pohutukawa trees in bloom, the Rush Munro’s ice cream shop is closed, due, says a sign, to the terrible weather. The wind gusts in icy blasts and at Marineland the show goes on. After Shona died Marineland put an ad in the local paper: “The Show Goes On! Come and cheer dolphin Kelly along as she goes solo!” You suspect that ad describes a chirpiness nobody was feeling.
Is it a sad thing, to go and watch the show go on, twice a day, when the show features the last dolphin in captivity? When this story about the last dolphin appears, Kelly will have lived here for 37 years and two days. The pool is 30 metres long, 15 metres wide, 4.5 metres deep. “No, it’s probably not big enough,” Macdonald says, “but interestingly enough, by United States standards it is and under the Marine Mammal Protection Act it’s perfectly adequate.” An Olympic swimming pool is 50 metres long, 25 metres wide, a minimum depth of two metres.
THE DAY Kelly was caught, Macdonald remembers as a nice day. It went smoothly. Kelly was caught mid-morning, Shona in that late morning, early afternoon. They were caught, he seems to recall, close to shore, around the port area. “So long ago.” Such a long time ago, when the idea of catching dolphins for entertainment purposes was regarded as a drawcard for a city.
On that day, there was no time for trauma, Macdonald says, not during the catching. “It was full-on, so much action” but later, “just seeing the animals in the small pool and basically knowing that just a couple of days ago they were out in the ocean. You know. It was my job. At that stage it was part of what we did. And, I guess, when I say I felt these things, probably the more I reflect on them from a distance, the more impact I put on it.” Marineland opened on January 29, 1965. On August 30, 1970 it received its millionth visitor; by August 1977, two million had visited; by December 1980, three million.
For the last 15 or so years visitor numbers averaged 70,000 a year. Last year, the first full financial year from July to June, since Shona died — that number dropped to 50,000 visitors.
It costs the city $385,000 a year to keep Marineland running.
There is no money to upgrade it. The place looks tired. There is an abandoned ride on-seal “it used to go up and down, for a dollar” in a corner. There is a fibreglass dolphin, propped against a fence. You can queue, behind ropes, to have your picture taken with a little blue penguin. A towel is placed on your lap, the penguin on the towel, and snap. For $6 you get the picture in a paper frame. “Congratulations! Today you had your picture taken with Onion.” Onion The penguin was found by a farmer and his his dog. The dog’s name was Mushroom, hence, logically, Onion.After a surprising number of people (seven) have their photo taken with Onion, the penguin waddles into Macdonald’s office.Usually it poops on his floor; today it just wobbles about a bit, is picked up to be stroked, then it wanders outside again. The girls show me pictures on their computer of the mad things people ask to have done in their penguin pictures: A penguin sitting on a Shrek doll. A penguin sitting on a man’s head, atop his cowboy hat.
“Oh yes, we starve them,” says Jacque Wilton, the education officer, about the Marineland animals. She says she no longer reads the paper; she’s sick of what the letter-writers have to say. After the death of one of the last dolphins” and there have been about 75 dolphins here since the doors opened ” animal rights protesters arrived carrying a coffin and chained themselves to the doors.
They carried signs which read: Dolphin Murderers.
In the visitors’ book, a Sea Shepherd member has written: “Free the animals! Disgraceful.” What a good idea. There are other animals at Marineland, many of them have been rescued from certain death. They are the maimed or the handicapped or the orphaned. There are two fur seals with eye problems, birds with broken wings. Some have been bred in captivity; none, including Kelly, could be freed.
When Shona died Macdonald and his staff took turns coming in before daybreak and staying until it got dark to sit with Kelly. They sat at the pool’s edge and talked to her, played with her with balls and seaweed and the hose, just made sure the dolphin knew someone was there.
“We hope she’s not lonely,” says Beckett.
In 1969 somebody threw a fish stuffed with nails into the dolphin pool. A dolphin died. In 1996 young boys broke in, threw a blue penguin in with a leopard seal which ” because it was too well fed” ignored it. The boys then stoned the penguin until it drowned. They hit Kelly with a metal bar. She still has the scars.
There was a family conference. “If you ever want to know a bigger crock than that stuff, tell me about it,” Macdonald says. “You can imagine,” he says, “what the staff felt. You can imagine why most of us like working with animals ” they’re not people.” People write letters to Marineland about Bobbi, the sulphurcrested cockatoo. How cruel, they write, to keep the bird locked up in a cage. These letters make the staff laugh. “That bird,” says Macdonald, “has been everywhere. She’s been to Wellington, to Palmerston North, in the car. The damn thing is never in its cage, mostly because it makes such a racket that it’s easier to let it out.” “That bird,” I say, “should be locked up for life.” The thing got the pip because I was ignoring it and its incessant “give Bobbi a scratch” and what the staff call its “child molester’s laugh”.
To pay me back, it clambered inside my bag, hauled out the fags, flipped the lid, took a cigarette and ate it, all the while keeping its beady eye on me. When I phone Macdonald later he says, “I’ve just seen Bobbi outside puffing up large. You’ve got him addicted, God damn it!” Bobbi came to Marineland because the guy who bought him (actually a she but everyone calls the bird him) as a gimmick for his shop and was driven mad by its carry-on. When they set all the animals free, they should send Bobbi to the Sea Shepherd guy who wrote in the visitors’ book.
To pay me back. It’s a bird. “Do you think Kelly’s lonely?” I asked. It’s a dolphin. I went to one of the two daily shows before I introduced myself to the staff. It was the day of the wind, a day where you really had to conjure up memories to imagine summer.
The three keepers came out from behind the murals, in their navy blue shorts and tops and white freezing-worker’s gumboots and waved gaily to the small crowd huddled in the grandstand.
We were told Kelly was semi-retired and it was her show. Also, she hates the wind. It was her show all right. If she hadn’t been a dolphin I would have said she was in a right old mood. She didn’t feel like putting on a show, so she didn’t. From the visitor’s book: “Sack the dolphin.” It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
“Oh, there’s laughing lady,” said Wilton when I met her later.
Amanda Milne said, “You put us off the show. We kept whispering to each other: who’s that woman and why is she laughing hysterically?”‘ To pay me back, they persuaded me to put on a wetsuit and get in the holding pool with the big mammal. They have teeth, you know. Kelly goes into this smaller pool once a week in winter and twice in summer while the big pool is drained, cleaned and re-filled. She is supposed to swim in of her own volition. You can train a dolphin, to a point. Today she is not going in. This means the pool will be drained around her to the level three of the female staff can get into freezing cold sea water up to their thighs and play chase the dolphin. This can go on for a very long time, during which the dolphin swims at them, swerves at the last minute and does not laugh hysterically (it’s a dolphin) while they skid over in the algae on the pool bottom. Nice rugby tackle, Jacque. This is what it takes to get the dolphin caught and lifted on to a sling by five male staff and into the holding pool. This ought to be traumatic. Within two minutes of having been taken off the sling and into the holding pool I am feeding her whole, export quality salmon. Does this mean she’s happy? Or just hungry? Do dolphins have emotions? “Of course they do,” says Macdonald. “Don’t all animals?” After Shona died Kelly became agitated. She was excitable and swam about frantically. The shows were stopped, so was the swimming with dolphins attraction. But Macdonald wanted to get her “back on the horse pretty quickly. That’s terrible! A dolphin on a horse. A new behaviour! Probably never been done before.
Anyway, moving on … We wanted to get her back into doing things and the show was important and the swim was important. Kelly always liked the swim and the interaction.” The female staff reckon Kelly likes the boys they think are cute. They call her “tart.” But, really, how can they know she likes swimming with people? “Well, if she didn’t, she would go down to the end of the pool where the people aren’t. We have an exclusion zone.” MARINELAND, home to so many childhood memories, will one day, probably, become a memory. Kelly is the last dolphin. A man called Clifford Church stood for the Napier mayoralty on an issue: Replacing the last dolphin at Marineland.
He said, “Marineland without dolphins is like a dog without a bone.” He didn’t win.
Barbara Arnott won her third term. She says, “DoC doesn’t see any use for the Government using Marineland either as a rehabilitation area, or a research area or a marine zoo.” What does that mean for Marineland? “What it means is that the council has done some figures and knows that to transform it into something that would draw the crowds after Kelly dies would be a big ask. And let’s face it: the dolphin is the drawcard. The council really believes it’s the end of an era.” Macdonald doesn’t want there to ever be another dolphin at Marineland. But he would like the zoo to survive. There are the other animals to be cared for. He would like it to be brighter and smarter. He has his little family, the staff, to be cared for. His staff sit in the tearoom which smells of fish and KFC. Carie Beattie is injecting whole salmon with Kelly’s vitamins and the pills which thin her blood. The staff play cards and swear with affectionate ferocity at each other for cheating. Bobbi bops about, screeching for a scratch. “The buzzard,” as Macdonald calls the thing, sits on Milne’s head and lets loose a stream of cockatoo excrement.
Beckett says, “you read about this place being turned into a wine and cheese venue,” and you try to keep staff morale up.
And all the while the last dolphin, Kelly, 37 years old here, 160 years in human terms, swims in her pool. Outside the fences with the barbed wire on top, is the sea. The dolphin doesn’t know that, does she? The dolphin can’t know any of what has happened in her lifetime and most certainly can’t know that when she dies, so, almost certainly, will Marineland at least in its current form.
Marineland will become a memory.
