Folks on twitter and people just surfing the net are searching quite frantically for “Dolphin to 44144″. For those of you that don’t know, this phrase is at the center of a controversy right now. Tonight at the Oscars, the documentary known as “The Cove” won the award for best documentary film. In typical Oscar fashion, the camera went directly to the stars of the movie the minute the award was announced. While this was going on, the producer of the movie held up a sign that read text dolphin to 44144. However, not many audience members at home were able to catch a glimpse of this as ABC, the network responsible for broadcasting the Oscars, cut away from the camera very quickly. Why did they do this? At this point, all we can do is speculate. It is causing some immense interest online, however.

For those of you that haven’t heard about the documentary, it talks about how dolphins are being slaughtered in Japan by the thousands each and every year. In an effort to get people more involved, the producer wrote text dolphin to 44144 on a sign, a message that would have reached millions of people. It is either that ABC didn’t approve of the message and thus chose to cut away from it, or that some other factor may be at play. We will keep an eye on this to see what sort of theories develop.