Any Way to Treat a Dolphin?

Satu, 51, says he has used his talent to kill 483 dolphins during traditional hunts in this South Pacific nation, harvesting the meat to feed his village and the teeth to use as money.

Now he has found a better way to make hard cash -- catching dolphins alive and selling them to an aquatic park halfway around the world.

"For me it's finished. No killing anymore," he said. "We have to look after the dolphins."

During the last nine months, Satu and his crew have caught 95 Pacific bottlenose dolphins for the tourist trade, sparking an international uproar far greater than any controversy they ever caused by eating them.

In July, Satu and his foreign partners, led by Canadian entrepreneur Christopher Porter, sold 28 of the dolphins to Parque Nizuc in Cancun, Mexico, for the increasingly popular activity of swimming with the beloved mammals. In the largest transfer of wild dolphins ever recorded by international regulators, a chartered DC-10 arrived from Brazil and flew the animals 12,800 miles from the island of Guadalcanal to their new home in the Caribbean.

The lucrative deal inflamed animal-welfare activists, who oppose keeping the highly intelligent creatures in captivity. They said the transaction bent international rules governing the trade in wildlife and ignored the ecological risks of moving a species from the Pacific to an environment half a world away.

"Think about what happened to those dolphins," said former dolphin trainer Richard O'Barry, a consultant for the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals, as he observed the creatures from a Cancun beach. "They were abducted by aliens and transported here in a UFO. They are traumatized."

Those involved in the deal say they complied with the laws of Mexico and the Solomon Islands.

All 28 dolphins survived the 17-hour flight but one died a week later, apparently from ailments associated with stress.

Nine more of the captive dolphins died in the Solomon Islands from stress and illness; 55 remain there.