Ric O’Barry founded Dolphin Project in 1970 to help free captive dolphins after spending years training the animals

NEED TO KNOW

• Ric O’Barry trained the dolphins for the 1960s TV show Flipper and bonded deeply with the animals
• Witnessing a captive dolphin’s death inspired O’Barry to dedicate his life to ending marine mammal captivity
• His nonprofit, Dolphin Project, has fought dolphin hunts, changed marine parks, and promoted sea sanctuaries worldwide

There are few dolphins more famous than Flipper, and Ric O’Barry was part of that stardom.

In the 1960s, O’Barry, now 86, trained the five dolphins who played the titular role in Flipper, the hit NBC show.

“I was the trainer for the 1960’s television show Flipper. I did all of the training for the five female dolphins who played the role of Flipper for the entire television series. I also participated in their capture,” O’Barry tells PEOPLE over email. He landed the role through his love of diving. The interest led to a job as a diver at the Miami Seaquarium, where he was promoted to dolphin trainer.

While working with the five Flipper dolphins for the show, O’Barry spent nearly all his time with them and bonded with the marine mammals.

“We became very close,” O’Barry notes. And through those interspecies friendships, O’Barry “came to believe that captivity kills. Captivity is wrong and must be abolished.” Freeing Flipper, a new documentary about O’Barry’s life, shows that one of the dolphins he befriended during training died in his arms, intensifying his anti-captivity beliefs.

O’Barry feels strongly about ending marine mammal captivity because he feels some responsibility for the rise in captive dolphins after Flipper’s popularity.

“Because of the worldwide success of the Flipper series, now everyone wanted to hug a dolphin, swim with a dolphin, see a dolphin show. And they’d only have to drive 2 hours from home. Marine parks popped up everywhere. I felt a great responsibility for that, and have spent the last 50+ years trying to undo the dolphin abusement park industry,” the former trainer says of what changed the course of his life.

In 1970, after deciding to commit to ending dolphin captivity, O’Barry founded Dolphin Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving and protecting dolphins. Through Dolphin Project, O’Barry has raised awareness of and worked to end the mass dolphin hunts in Japan—the subject of the 2009 documentary The Cove, which features O’Barry and Hayden Panettiere.

The organization has also helped end a traveling dolphin circus in Indonesia, fought for the rights of captive dolphins, and invested in the Dolphin Sanctuary Project, an effort to establish sea sanctuaries where captive dolphins can be rehabilitated and released into the wild. In 2019, Dolphin Project helped open the first permanent dolphin rehabilitation and retirement facility for formerly captive dolphins.

O’Barry’s beginnings as a dolphin trainer and journey into a dedicated animal advocate is the basis for the new documentary Freeing Flipper, executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, is also produced by O’Barry’s son, Lincoln O’Barry, who, like his dad, is devoted to ending dolphin captivity. He also had a front-row seat to his father’s work.

“One of Ric O’Barry’s greatest accomplishments has been taking something that, not that long ago, most people barely thought about—dolphin captivity—and forcing it into the cultural conversation,” Lincoln, 54, tells PEOPLE, adding that now because of organizations like Dolphin Project, “countries around the world are banning dolphin shows, and the idea of seaside sanctuaries has moved from something considered unrealistic to something governments, scientists, and animal-welfare groups are seriously discussing.”

“For the past 50 years, I’ve watched my dad pioneer the difficult work of readapting captive dolphins and, when possible, returning them to the wild,” Lincoln notes, “I’ve watched that work take place in the United States, Colombia, Brazil, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Bali, Italy, and elsewhere.”

Much of this work is recounted in Freeing Flipper, including Ric’s efforts to release the “Flipper of Brazil,” a dolphin who was “captured and dragged kicking and screaming away from his mother,” according to Ric.

“About ten years later we rescued him from isolation in a substandard, filthy tank in Santos, Brazil. We used my protocol to rehabilitate and release Flipper back into the wild and reconnect him with his mother,” Ric says of the 1990s rescue. He notes that the Flipper of Brazil continued to be sighted in the wild for several years after his release.

“Words fail me when I actually see them reunited with the sea once again. Dolphins are incomplete without the sea,” Ric adds, explaining why the difficult work of saving dolphins is worth it.

The former trainer has seen the world’s marine parks and the laws that govern them change for the better since starting Dolphin Project decades ago, but the fight isn’t over for him or his son.

“For decades, the fight was about convincing the public that dolphins do not belong performing tricks in concrete tanks. Much of the world understands that now. The question we face today is harder: What do we do with the dolphins who are still there?” Lincoln asks.

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“Can former performing dolphins be moved into seaside sanctuaries, where they can experience natural seawater, tides, depth, space, and a degree of autonomy they have never known?” he continues, adding, “They are the questions that will define the next era of this movement. And that is what Freeing Flipper is about.”

For Ric, the message he hopes the public receives from the film is simple: “Captivity is wrong. It’s inherently hypocritical to destroy the dolphin’s life in order to enhance ours. “

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