mondol seima district, Koh Kong province – Okhna Ly Yong Phat has built his own animal kingdom.
Koh Kong Safari World is now a year old, and complaints from government officials and wildlife conservationists that the casino attraction is a virtual death row for dolphins have faded out of earshot.
The contested dolphins—some of them—are still there, jumping through hoops and providing daily entertainment to a trickle of Thai and Cambodian visitors.
And after several pushes for disclosure by wildlife groups, it remains uncertain how many dolphins are kept at Safari World, and what their condition may be.
According to Sum Hean, deputy director of the wildlife protection office in the Ministry of Agriculture, the theme park has government permission to keep 12 dolphins—eight Indo-Pacific humpbacks and four Irrawaddys, a species that faces extinction.
Wildlife officials have warned that populations of both species are in decline.
Safari World managers declined to speak to reporters, and park guides said there were no Irrawaddy dolphins at the facility. Three dolphins who recently performed for reporters and a few dozen park visitors appeared to be humpbacks.
The government doesn’t know how many dolphins Ly Yong Phat keeps, either, Sun Hean said. He said he will travel to Koh Kong at the end of the month to count the dolphins.
Previous attempts at counting Safari World’s stock have been rebuffed, however. Sun Hean and Isabel Beasley, an expert on the endangered dolphins, visited Safari World in mid-2003, but were not allowed to see all the animals.
Beasley said they had received permission from Ly Yong Phat to tag the dolphins for identification purposes. Registering the dolphins would give the government assurance that Safari World was not catching more dolphins to replace dead ones, or that it was not trading dolphins to other animal parks.
“It’s a very simple solution,” Beasley said.
Park managers, however, barred their entry into the dolphins’ holding aquarium.
Ly Yong Phat has in the past been impervious to agreements made with wildlife groups, according to Suwanna Gauntlett, country director of WildAid. When the dolphins arrived at the park in 2002, months before Prime Minister Hun Sen inaugurated it last year, it was discovered that several had died in captivity.
Wildlife groups and Agriculture Minister Chan Sarun demanded the dolphins’ release that year, but it never happened. Gauntlett recalled that Ly Yong Phat simply declined to release the dolphins when representatives from her group traveled there to oversee the release.
“It’s really embarrassing. We thought we had a relationship,” Gauntlett said. She said she was later told that provincial authorities may disrupt WildAid activity in Koh Kong if she persisted with the dolphin issue.
The government later gave Safari World permission to keep 12 dolphins on the condition that it make full disclosure of their numbers and condition.
As part of the casino complex pushed against the Thai border, Safari World is a major part of Ly Yong Phat’s plans to make Koh Kong a tourist hotspot. Those plans included the financing in 2002 of a 1,900-meter bridge connecting Koh Kong town to Mondol Seima, where Safari World and several casinos are located.
It appears to be working. During the Chinese New Year’s holiday, hotels were booked solid in Koh Kong town and Safari World received a few hundred visitors a day.
Ly Yong Phat is president of Hero-King Ltd cigarette company. Several attempts to reach him by telephone this week failed.
The dolphin show is one of many attractions in the sprawling castlelike complex. An orangutan show features 12 apes that kickbox, ride bicycles and dance to pop music. In another show, sea lions play volleyball and perform other tricks.
There are also recreational stops along the way. Outside the dolphin show, visitors can pose with a baby tiger, or a small orangutan in a Vietnamese-style silk dress.
Though Safari World is full of such surprises, the dolphin show may be its crown jewel. They dance to music, play pet to eager children and are crowd favorites.
But captivity is a dire fate for Irrawaddy dolphins in particular, Beasley said. All that have been kept in captivity have died, she said. Not much is known about how to care for the species, and they are prone to stress in such a public atmosphere, Beasley said.
“They don’t like people, they don’t like pools and they’re not very acrobatic. In the wild they don’t jump…. It’s not part of their natural behavior,” she said.
Their capture has severely depleted the local population, she added. Fishermen who once reported being pestered by the dolphins now say they see none, she said.
“They’ve taken these dolphins from the wild, with no estimates on the population size where they’re taken from,” she said.
