What once seemed like a victory, though, has now become as tangled as an old fishing net. After intense lobbying by the Mexican government and the Clinton administration, Congress passed a bill last week that will make the dolphin-safe label almost meaningless. During the two-year battle that led to the bill's passage, five powerful environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, sided with the administration. Opponents of the legislation, including 85 other environmental and animal welfare groups, call it a trade treaty masquerading as environmental policy. At least 6 million dolphins died between 1958 and 1994, when U.S. fishermen in the Eastern Tropical Pacific stopped using purse seine nets.
Purse seines are what kills dolphins.
For reasons nobody understands, schools of tuna swim beneath the mammals in this ocean region. Fishermen chase the dolphins down and herd them like cattle with high-speed boats. They encircle both dolphins and the accompanying tuna in a mile-long net, whose bottom and top edges are then bunched up like a drawstring purse, trapping both fish and cetaceans. In 1990, when the three major tuna canneries announced they would no longer buy tuna caught with dolphins, many U.S. fishermen departed the Eastern Tropical Pacific for the western Pacific, where tuna have no cetacean escorts. But Latin American boats have continued using purse seines in the ETP, though they have learned how to release the mammals from their nets.