Opo Featured In B.B.C. TV Film On Dolphins

Press, Volume CI, Issue 30007, 17 December 1962, Page 14

Opo Featured In B.B.C. TV Film On Dolphins

[From the London Correspondent of “The Press")

LONDON, December 3. Opo, New Zealand’s famous dolphin, is back in the news. He provides an important section of a film, “Ride a Dolphin,” which will be presented on 8.8. C. television this month. Pelorus Jack, too, is mentioned. The film about dolphins, made by Mr T. Soper, formerly of the 8.8.C.’s Natural History Unit, is based on truth and legend. "Opo’s section, which runs for a couple of minutes, provides a vital part of the story,” said Mr Soper. “The film footage came to me by way of New Zealand House in London (they are credited in the caption sequence), but I regret that I don’t know who actually shot it, although I should like to.” Mr Soper provided a transcript of the Opo section which reads as follows: ’. . . A legend come to life. It is just no longer possible to laugh the stories off as fairy tales. And that is not the only example. In New Zealand, in 1956, there was a dolphin which made friends with people at a place called Opononi in Hokianga Harbour. “This dolphin allowed people to stroke it with an oar, and it seemed to like human company, although it was a wild animal, of course, quite free. It came every day to the shallow water, to the beach, and especially liked the sound of outboard motors, or so we are told. People came from far and wide to see this dolphin, and they called him (or her, we don’t know which) Opo. And it is recorded that while the dolphin was there there was an unusually friendly atmosphere about the place. The same atmosphere, curiously enough, which was recorded a couple of thousand years before by the Romans, and indeed later by myself at Plymouth. But the really exciting thing about this New Zeeland dolphin, Opo, is that it allowed children to sit on its back.

The legendary stories, come alive again. One little girl called Jill Baker, struck up a close friendship with the dolphin, and she tells how Opo allowed her to pat it and to stroke its back. “It is difficult not to believe that some of those classical legends were not

fairy stories at all, but reports of actual events coloured, if you like, but with a basis in fact. “Back at the turn of the century, when these pictures were taken, there was a famous dolphin called Pelorus Jack. For 20 years, from 1888, Pelorus Jack acted as a pilot to ships going through Cook Strait, between the two main islands in New Zealand. He was legally protected by an Order in Council of September 1904 —surely the first individual dolphin to be honoured in this way. How those New Zealanders of 60 years ago would have approved of the respect the Americans have today for the pampered dolphins in their giant oceanarias, with their own personalised feeding service by trained divers.”