Supply and Demand

In the summer of 1968, Richard O’Feldman must have wondered how he came to be playing the flute on the back of a killer whale. The curly-haired twenty-eight-year-old was no stranger to marine mammals. Growing up on Miami Beach in the 1940s, he had often seen bottlenose dolphins. “Back in those days, Biscayne Bay was teeming with them,” he recalled, and his mother told him tales of dolphins rescuing downed pilots. Thirsting for adventure, fifteen-year-old O’Feldman lied about his age to join the National Guard and later enlisted in the navy. Over the next five years, he rode a US destroyer around the world, hearing his first dolphin calls in the ship’s sonar room and training to become a navy diver. Not yet twenty-one when he left the service, he dabbled in treasure hunting off the Florida coast before finding work at the Miami Seaquarium. His first day on the job, O’Feldman joined the marine park’s collection crew on an expedition to capture dolphins in Biscayne Bay. “In those days, you didn’t need a permit,” he explained. “You could do whatever you wanted.” As a diver, his task was to search for entangled dolphins while keeping the net clear of coral snags. The collection method made casualties inevitable. “I would find dolphins wrapped up dead,” he admitted. “We killed a lot.” By 1962, O’Feldman had helped capture more than a hundred bottlenose dolphins. The Miami Seaquarium kept some for display, but it sold most to other marine parks. Among them were US buyers such as Marineland of the Pacific and Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, as well as a growing number of European dolphinariums. “Places were just opening,” he noted, “and we were supplying them.” Among the eager customers was his former employer, the US Navy, which had just launched its Marine Mammal Program. O’Feldman saw nothing wrong with captivity—“never questioned it at all,” he told me. Never, that is, until he began working with the animals himself.