Ric O'Barry is one of the world's best-known environmentalists. A former U.S. Navy diver, he later trained the five dolphins that played Flipper in the hit 1960s TV series of that name, before turning against dolphin captivity in 1970.
Now aged 67, O'Barry has spent his life since as an animal-rights campaigner, and much of the last decade fighting what he calls "the secret genocide" of dolphins in the Wakayama Prefecture town of Taiji, in Japan, where thousands are killed from October to March every year.
O'Barry believes the dolphin hunt -- which is conducted by just 26 men in 13 boats -- only continues because the Japanese media avoids reporting it, and that "this would not survive anywhere else in the free world.''
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