'Blood Dolphins' TV Show to Premiere, Starring 'The Cove'

Dolphin activist Ric O'Barry, right, and his son, Lincoln, speak at a panel before the premiere of their new show, "Blood Dolphins." (Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

A new TV miniseries is set to air on Friday, starring dolphin activist Ric O'Barry.

Called Blood Dolphins, the series promisies to pick up where The Cove left off in its documentation of an annual dolphin slaughter in a secretive Japanese inlet.

In Blood Dolphins, O'Barry, the man at the center of The Cove, and his son Lincoln, will track down dolphins in captivity or in the crosshairs of hunters to save the creatures from “murder” and enslavement.

“It really doesn’t seem like anything’s changed here,” Lincoln O'Barry says of the Japanese cove in the preview of the show.

“The slaughter is about to begin,” the elder O'Barry says. 

The series airs on Animal Planet at 9 p.m. on Fridays. The Cove will also show on Planet Green September 4 at 10 p.m. 

In the first episode, the show tracks the O'Barry pair's return to Taiji, the location of the titular cove in the Academy Award-winning film. There, each year, local fishermen herd dolphins into a narrow bay, where some are selected for sale to captive dolphin facilities.

The rest are harpooned and slaughtered for their meat.

Blood Dolphins uses many of the tactics seen in the feature documentary, including clandestine filming of the Taiji cove and other areas where O'Barry says dolphins are mistreated. The show also takes them to a captive dolphin facility in the Solomon Islands. 

The film has been a lightning rod on dolphin issues, especially in Japan, where it's been accused of painting Japanese people in a negative light, and an attack on a traditional practice.

The show comes a day after Japan invited other pro-whaling nations to a meeting intended to build support for striking down a global ban on commercial whale hunting, the Canadian Press reports.

Currently, the International Whaling Commission has a blanket ban on commercial whaling. Japan, Norway and Iceland continue to annually hunt whales through loopholes or in outright defiance of the prohibition.

Japan claims that it hunts whales for scientific study.

Participant Media, the parent company of TakePart, helped facilitate the Social Action Campaign for The Cove.