The Cove Documentary and Animal Rights

 

 

The Cove and Animals Rights 

The Cove has received nearly universal acclaim, earning a 2009 Academy Award for best Documentary Feature film, perhaps because it is, according to Andrew O’Hehir, “a grim tale of murdered dolphins and poisoned school kids” that spins into “an amazing, real-life spy story video.” O’Hehir asserts, for example, that the film “raises troubling questions about how badly we have befouled the 70 percent of our planet that’s covered with water, and about why we have treated the species closest to us in intelligence with such cruelty and contempt.” Justin Chang declares, “Eco-activist documentaries don’t get much more compelling than The Cove, an impassioned piece of advocacy filmmaking that follows Flipper trainer-turned-marine crusader Richard O’Barry in his efforts to end dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan.” According to Chang, “it’s hard not to feel that there’s something uniquely barbaric about the destruction of this exceptionally intelligent, human-friendly species. Even Noel Murray, who calls the film “muddled” suggests that “The Cove offers a lot to think about in terms of the future of fishing, and Psihoyos’ gift for fiction-feature conventions does make a seemingly unpalatable subject entertaining.” 

Murray’s critique of the film, however, like other reviewers’ accolades, rests on its reliance on the point of view of dolphin advocate, Ric O’Barry, who, as Murray suggests, sides with “anyone who wants to protect dolphins, whether they want to shutter Sea World or not.” The Cove, then, is both praised and condemned because it valorizes an animal rights ethic. Animal rights ethicists like Peter Singer first argue that dolphins as a species deserve the same liberation movements as do human groups. As Singer argues, the film suggests that speciesism should be eradicated, just as racism and sexism should be abolished, primarily because animals are so much like humans. 

To support his claim, Singer asserts that humans are only considered morally superior because they belong to the species Homo sapiens. Singer also suggests that using this membership to define superiority is completely arbitrary. Instead, then, we should consider sentience—the capacity of a being to experience pleasure and pain—as a plausible criterion of moral importance. If we use sentience as a criterion, we extend to other sentient creatures the same basic moral consideration, the basic principle of equality. Therefore, we ought to extend to animals the same equality of consideration that we extend to human beings. Singer, like O’Barry, also connects selected animals more closely with humans, defining them as persons, a category that includes both sentience and self-awareness over time. In The Cove, O’Barry defines dolphins as both sentient and self-aware, offering these characteristics of persons as reasons for ensuring their safety and freedom.