The Marine Mammal Protection Act was put into effect in 1972 because of the bycatch that the tuna fishermen were having on dolphin populations by encircling them with purse seines. And as they brought the tuna to the surface, a lot of the dolphin were drowning in the nets. There wasn’t a methodology or a technique similar to the TED netting processes that turtles now escape the shrimp boaters. So the Marine Mammal Protection Act was put into effect that you could not kill a marine mammal in the wild. But they’ve had some exceptions. If you were gonna do filming, you had to get a permit. If you wanted to take animals for public display, you had to then determine the size of the population of that species and determine with the scientists at National Marine Fishery Service what’s a sustainable removal. And then you’d get a federal permit to do that.
