Tuna Without The Guilt

"What if we had a good-guy tuna company that was on the ((dolphin)) team? A lot of these guys would buy that, so their kids wouldn't get mad at them, right? And if it costs too much, we charge a penny more. We make it part of the game plan."

-- Warren Beatty,

Heaven Can Wait, 1978

As if they were finally taking a cue from the movie of a decade ago, the three largest sellers of canned tuna in the U.S. made a decision last week in which they came off as the good guys. Faced with a growing consumer boycott of their product, the companies said they would no longer sell tuna caught by methods harmful to dolphins. Star-Kist Seafood, the world's largest tuna canner, led the way last week. "Star-Kist will not purchase any tuna caught in association with dolphins," said Anthony O'Reilly, chairman of H.J. Heinz, which owns Star-Kist.

The tuna company will put a DOLPHIN SAFE logo on its cans, and may have to charge "a couple cents more" to account for higher costs, O'Reilly said. The dolphin-free promise was matched on the same day by the two other major canners, Bumble Bee Seafoods and Van Camp Seafood, which sells Chicken of the Sea brand. Environmentalists responded with glee. "It was an incredibly wise and incredibly responsible action," said Senator Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware, who is a co-sponsor of a dolphin-protection bill. But August Felando of the American Tunaboat Association contended that the action would only serve to penalize the fishing fleet, which has improved its methods for protecting dolphins.

An estimated 100,000 of the mammals die annually when they are inadvertently trapped in tuna nets. Most of the slaughter is in the eastern Pacific from Chile to Southern California, where, for reasons still unknown to biologists, dolphins tend to school with yellowfin tuna. The dolphins fall prey to the purse-seine method of netting, in which fishermen cast a large net around a school of tuna and then pull it taut like the drawstring of a purse. The canners said last week they will no longer accept tuna caught in the region unless it has been harvested without snaring dolphins as well. Their decision is likely to make good business sense. Said Daniel Sullivan, president of Bumble Bee: "Canned tuna is good for you, and we want to continue to sell as much as we can."