Event: Celebrate the Wild Dolphins of San Carlos
When: This Saturday June 25 from 4 to 7 p.m.
Where: San Francisco Beach next to El Conquistador Condos
First and foremost I would like to thank the 10 businesses that sponsored our Celebration of Wild Dolphins in San Carlos event that we will be having this Saturday June 25 on San Francisco beach from 4 – 7 p.m. Right next to the Conquistador Condos. It didn’t take long to find the 10 sponsors.
4 Ever Happy Hour: Ramon Cruz
Team Margarita Fishing: Bryan Repogle
Athletic Club San Carlos: Fabiola & Ines
Posada del Desierto: Lorena
Grupo Caballero: Kiko Caballero
MDS Medical Diagnostic Sevices: Venassa & Mike
El Mar Diving: Feliza & Jose Luis
FishingSanCarlos.com: John & Jen Hildebran
Catch 22 sportfishing: Fernando Almada
Captains Club: Mike Napolitano
Ocean Peace: Marisol
WorldsAquarium: Vince
Here is the deal and it is plan and it is simple. People have woken up all over the world and now realize that dolphin enclosures and dolphin swim programs, where tourists pay money to swim with captive dolphins, has finally and thankfully gone out of fashion. People realize that these types of programs are really simply exploiting a sentient self aware being. One of the most exploitative parts of this whole dolphin in captivity charade is dolphin therapy. Don’t take my word for it do the research yourself. You will find that there are studies out there paid for by the dolphin industry that say dolphin therapy works. To the best of my knowledge none of these studies are peer reviewed and when was the last time you saw a you tube video from the family of any child claiming their child has been miraculously helped by having a dolphin shoot some sonic waves into their brain?
The dolphinarium in San Carlos was nothing more than a horribly fulfilled political promise from a governor who left office in shame with the blood of 49 children on his hands because of the ABC day care center fire in Hermosillo. When Eduardo Bours was elected governor of Sonora he had promised, god only knows why, to build a dolphin therapy/dolphin attraction facility in San Carlos. Who knows how much money was kicked back to government officials during the construction process but regardless of all that the facility was built. Many people questioned the wisdom of building this facility in a town that is seriously lacking demographically speaking. The bought and paid for Mexican media never ever questioned the powers to be that perhaps if you really wanted to help children shouldn’t you build a top notch hospital in Guaymas? Might that not be a better way to spend the many millions of dollars that went into this charade?
The other thing that did not fall into place with the dolphinarium was where were the dolphins going to come from? The original plan was to take 6 dolphins in from the wild that belong to a population of around 400 bottle nose dolphins just south of here by Huatabampo. The state almost got the permitting to do just that. But typical stupidity by someone in the state government ended the plan when a state official got the bright idea to actually change the environmental impact plan and increase the number of dolphins that could be taken from the Huatabampo population after the permit had been approved. When that was revealed to federal authorities the permit that the state held to take wild dolphins was revoked. The dolphinarium was complete and they had no permit to capture wild dolphins. The state was then forced to hire the services of one of the many private dolphin companies in Mexico. I wrote a piece called the The Deadly Dolphinarium of San Carlos and published the soap opera from beginning to end. No other media out let in the state of Sonora could was allowed to print the real story. Need less to say many dolphins died her in San Carlos due to ineptitude, corruption, negligence and greed.
When the last private company dolphin slave company finally pulled out of San Carlos the state officials who were running the system came up with the hair brained idea of actually illegally capturing some of our wild dolphins who live right in front of the estuary. Yep that is right. They were going to come up with a bull shit song and dance story on how some of our local dolphins had been injured and needed to be rehabilitated. They were stopped by a brave whistleblower named Marisol Guerrero. Marisol and I are organizing this event!
Enough said on the past. What is about to happen in the future, unless we convince the governor to not do it, is that a company with one of the shittiest reputations in Latin America when it comes to dolphins in captivity is now negotiating with governor Claudia Pavlovich to not only reopen the facility here in San Carlos but also open up a tourist dolphin swim program close to Phoenix Arizona. Dolphinaris needs to expand you see. They have to many dolphins and not enough places to put them. What happened was that a marine park in Mexico City called Atlantis was finally shut down and the dolphins were confiscated by PROFPA and moved to an enclosure in Cancun. Dolphinaris needs to get these dolphins working so they can earn their keep you see. It ain’t cheap enslaving dolphins for the folly of man.
All over the world people have decided with their pocket books that dolphin captivity is no longer in fashion. It is cruel and unusual treatment. Documentaries such as The Cove and BlackFish have exposed the greedy underbelly of the industry. Mexican legislators, miracles still happen, have recently passed cruelty to animal legislation that has ended once and for all, the traveling animal circus industry in Mexico. I have been to several of these animal circus shows over the years and I have to admit I always felt bad for that poor toothless arthritic bengal tiger who was forced once again to jump through a ring of fire. You could just see in the eyes of that tiger how sick to fucking death he was of jumping through that hoop. We made jokes about it at the time. I like to think I have grown up a little since then. Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey this year retired their famous elephant show and perhaps the biggest news of the year which was just released is the amazing thing that is happening at the Baltimore Aquarium.
The Baltimore Aquarium is spending millions of dollars on a dolphin sanctuary in Florida. By 2020 all of their captive dolphins, some have lived their whole lives of 24 years in captivity, will be moved to this new sanctuary and will be taught to live in the wild. It is a bold statement. So under this back drop it seems foolish, no idiotic is a better term, for the state of Sonora to try to get into the dolphin slave trade one more time.
Worlds Aquarium has a better proposal for Governor Pavlovich and it goes like this. Just 400 miles south of San Carlos and 350 miles north there are two very successful business models that would make sense in San Carlos. The Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson and the Mazatlan Aquarium. It was about 23 years ago that I first visited the Mazatlan Aquarium. Back then it was not much more than a few rooms and a bunch of small tanks. It has grown over the years to be a very successful attraction to the city of Mazatlan. We believe this idea makes far more sense than the current proposal which goes something like this. The State of Sonora is going to invest 40 million pesos to rehabilitate the facility. Dolphinaris or some other entity is going to spend another 40 million in private money. So in dollars we are talking around 4.4 million on a controversial industry in a town that has not got even close to the demographics that would be needed to make a dolphin enclosure profitable. The politics should be removed from the scenario and common business sense should be allowed to shine through. Here is the biggest reasons of all, besides the fact that you are simply torturing these poor animals by making them live in such a confined area. You give false hope to families whose children are treated at this facility. Remember dolphin therapy’s are a crock! You might as well give these families a rescue dog from the SBPA and enough food for 5 years and the money would be far better spent than this cockamamy dolphinario.
There are not many places in the world where you can see on a day to day basis dolphins swimming in the wild right from the beach. San Carlos is one such place. They provide so much to San Carlos economically and environmentally and are such an important part of the San Carlos “experience” that is it hard to imagine the bay with out them in it and even harder to imagine that officials from the state of Sonora once tried to enslave some of them just for money. So this Saturday the 25 of June right next to the Conquistador Condos come join us in celebration of these free and wild marvelous mammals that make San Carlos a better place to live for all of us supposed Homo Sapiens! The t shirts are on the house while they last.