And the Oscar Goes to … ‘The Cove’!
OK, so we didn’t get to see a song-and-dance number featuring Steve Martin and vegetarian Alec Baldwin—who also narrated PETA’s now-classic documentary Meet Your Meat—but we’re still pretty happy about how the highly buzzed Food Inc./Cove face-off turned out.
The Oscar for Best Documentary went to frontrunner The Cove—the universally acclaimed examination of Japan’s bloody dolphin trade and slaughter. And in one of the most inspiring moments of the night, Ric O’Barry proved that he’ll stop at nothing to end the slaughter by displaying a sign encouraging people to get active for dolphins during his acceptance speech.
The win couldn’t have come at a better time for captive marine wildlife, as Sea World and other parks come under increasing scrutiny for their abysmal record of injuries and deaths of both trainers and animals in the wake of last month’s incident at SeaWorld.
On the red carpet, The Cove‘s director Louie Psihoyos put it best when he said, “One animal killing three people in one lifetime shows these animals are stressed, they don’t belong in captivity. And when we capture them out of the wild and force them to do stupid tricks for our amusement, it says more about our intelligence than it does theirs.”
Written by Logan Scherer
