Dolphin lover speaks up for animal rights Margaux Ortiz Inquirer
November 02, 2006
THE appalling sight of dolphins being butchered off the coasts of Japan has led to a decade-long crusade for animal rights.
Trixie Concepcion, coordinator of the nongovernmental organization Earth Island Institute (E.I.I.) in UP Village, Diliman, Quezon City, was a grade school student when she saw the disturbing image on television.
“I was horrified. Dolphins, whom young children consider as friends, were apparently thought of as pests in some major islands of Japan and butchered,” she said in an interview with the Inquirer.
Young as she was, she thought that such injustice against the friendly marine mammals had to be stopped. “I said to myself, one of these days I’m going to do something to end it,” she says as she recalls an experience that drove her close to tears.
Years later, she would begin to fulfill that childhood vow. It began by joining environmental organizations like Haribon, Marine Biological Society, and the UP Mountaineers while she was a college student at the University of the Philippines.
Shortly after graduation, major in geology, she began working at the Earth Island Institute, a U.S.-based NGO that monitors the tuna industry for dolphin safety.
Unusual choice of work
“It is unheard of for local geologists to work for environmental companies. Geology graduates usually ended up in mining companies or industries that extracted resources,” says Concepcion. She signed up as a researcher for E.I.I. after working briefly at the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center, which dealt with the legal aspect of environmental issues.
After more than a decade with the NGO and intensive research on animal cruelty, she became “an animal rights activist.”
Different views
Concepcion explains that there are three schools of thought in the campaign against animal maltreatment.
Animal welfare advocates are against the cruel treatment of animals but can eat meat and consume animal by-products. They believe that “If people should kill animals for food or any important need, they should do so humanely,” she says.
For their part, animal rights activists do not eat meat or use animal products. She says that E.I.I., People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), and the Palawan Animal Welfare Association Inc. belong to this category.
The most radical, she says, are the animal liberationists. “Liberationists do what others (consider) criminal activities – breaking into laboratories and setting free animals used for experiments, for example,” she said.
“Blurred concepts”
Concepcion notes that while the three schools of thought are well-defined in the United States, they are still “blurred concepts” in the Philippines.
“Animal rights advocacy in the country is not as strong as in the United States and Europe. We are still a long way off,” she said.
She herself gradually became an advocate for animals, especially marine mammals like dolphins when she began working for the institute. One of her proudest achievements was preventing a traveling dolphin show from performing in Pasay City a few years back.
“We told people that dolphins got seriously stressed out when confined in small containers while being transported from one place to the next,” she said. She felt vindicated when many customers began returning their tickets after hearing about the dolphins’ plight.
Concepcion is also strongly opposed to marine parks which feature performing sea creatures. “Dolphins—characterized by their beak-like snouts, teeth and dorsal fins—are often used as show animals because of their intelligence,” she explained.
But they have never been domesticated in their evolutionary history and, used to swimming miles in the ocean, feel confined in tanks, she said. A gauge of these creatures’ intelligence is that they “get depressed when they cannot use their echolocation abilities, which enable them to determine the shape, density, distance and location of objects by the way they bounce off sonar waves.” This is why they bang their heads on hard surfaces and, in extreme cases, commit suicide by holding their breath.
Concepcion said their fight against animal rights violators like marine parks “becomes frustrating whenever the government and other responsible agencies ignore (our) advocacies. This is apart from the ridicule I get even from my friends and family who tease me about my serious dedication to animals,” she adds.
She often has to explain her lifestyle to those interested enough to listen to her. “People ask why I am a vegetarian, for example, and I have to explain the reason why without being preachy.” Concepcion adds that despite the obvious disadvantages, people’s growing respect for their cause has been more than enough reward.
“Who knows, maybe 50 years from now, a strict consideration of animal rights would not be what many consider a silly idea anymore,” Trixie Concepcion says with a smile.
