"As I sat glued to my black-and-white TV back then, though, I had no idea that the trainer of those dolphin stars, Richard “Ric” O’Barry, was to have something so tragic happen to him as to change his whole life. As he explained to me last month while we sat chatting in our Afan woods in the hills outside Kurohime, one of his dolphins swam into his arms, then deliberately stopped breathing and died. (Cetaceans do not breath involuntarily like us humans and most other mammals; they decide when and when not to breathe.) By not breathing, as Ric said, the desperate captive animal consciously committed suicide."