Petition: Give Dolphins Legal Personhood to Protect Them from Harm

Discarded fishing lines are everywhere, and they’re killing wildlife – including brilliant, playful, social dolphins. The old gear can tangle around dolphins, permanently maiming them or even killing them via drowning.

Jeongjoon Lee, a Korean documentary filmmaker known as “Dolphin Man,” recalls one time he and a group of other animal lovers helped save an at-risk dolphin: “we had to cut [fishing] wire from two different places. One was going in through the dolphin’s face to its body, and another from around its tail where it had become entangled.” As he explains, “Because the dolphins cannot cut the fishing lines themselves, we decided to cut them for them.”

Luckily, there are stronger actions lawmakers can take to protect these phenomenal marine mammals. One of those is granting bottlenose dolphins “legal personhood” – giving them legal rights to safety and humane treatment. Let’s stand with animal lovers in Korea and urge the Korean government to recognize dolphins as “legal persons”!

One of the benefits of legal personhood is that if a fishing corporation, rich person’s yacht, or other group or individual threatens dolphins’ well-being, wildlife conservations could actually sue them on the dolphins’ behalf.

Action like that could make corporations and careless individuals finally start respecting these phenomenal animals’ rights. And the timing couldn’t be more crucial. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists dolphins as “near threatened.” That means the animals are not quite threatened yet, but they’re on their way to becoming more vulnerable to extinction – and we need to intervene while we still can.

The main threats to dolphins’ safety right now are mostly from human activity. That includes pollution and farm run-off, the reckless use and abandonment of fishing equipment, human construction, tourist boats and jetskis, and climate change – which is wreaking havoc on the entire ocean ecosystem.

Dolphins have unique names they give to each other, calling each other using unique “whistles.” This makes them one of the only animal species we know of that actually assigns, uses, and responds to individualized names they give each other. Meanwhile, humans often recognize specific dolphins by the scars on their fins and bodies, left from traumatic, disfiguring interactions with humans or human gear.

Let’s stand with activists in Korea as they fight to help these wonderful animals! Sign the petition to urge the Korean government to list bottlenose dolphins as having “legal personhood”!

This article by Nicholas Vincent was first published by One Green Planet on 21 August 2025. Lead Image Credit: Nicolas-SB/Shutterstock.