Dolphin Rights

[Simulist]

The Dark Secrets That Dolphins Don't Want You to Know
By Miriam Goldstein Posted Wednesday, May 13, 2009


It never fails. Every single cocktail party, as soon as someone finds out that I'm a graduate student studying marine biology, they ask, "So, do you get to play with dolphins?" Since my heart is as black and cold as the oceanic abyss, I usually take this opportunity to disillusion yet another poor soul of their childhood fantasy of Mystical Dolphin Love .

Dolphins are not gentle or psychic. If they could talk they would not impart eco-wisdom or deep spiritual truth. Dolphins are violent predators with a predilection for baby killing and rape. I feel it's my duty to warn you, despite the risk of insulting creatures made of hundreds of pounds of muscle and rows of sharp teeth. Throw out your rainbow dolphin painting , and check out dolphins' low-down dirty secrets:

--Dolphin sex can be violent and coercive. Gangs of two or three male bottlenose dolphins isolate a single female from the pod and forcibly mate with her, sometimes for weeks at a time. To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails. And if she tries to swim away, they chase her down. Horny dolphins have also been known to target human swimmers -Demi Moore is rumored to have had a close encounter of the finny kind.

--Dolphins kill harbor porpoise babies. In Scotland, scientists found baby harbor porpoises washed up with horrific internal injuries. They thought the porpoises might have been killed by weapons tests until they found the toothmarks. Later, dolphins were caught on film pulping the baby porpoises-the dolphins even used their ecolocation to aim their blow at the porpoises' vital organs.

--Dolphins kill their own babies. Baby dolphins have washed up alongside the dead porpoises, and some scientists think that all the porpoise-slaughter was just practice for some old-fashioned infanticide . For other mammals like lions, killing the babies makes the females immediately ready for the next pregnancy, and maybe that's the case with dolphins, too.

The scariest part is dolphins can wreak havoc day and night without sleeping. A recent study found that dolphins could stay awake for five days straight with no loss of mental acuity. The dolphins didn't even need to make up sleep at the end of the study, though the scientists sure did.

If the dolphins ever evolve thumbs , we're in trouble. It will be like a slasher-film remake of Douglas Adams' So Long And Thanks for All The Fish . If I wash up with pulped innards and dolphin tooth marks, you'll know why. After all, you never hear about the people the dolphins push out to sea.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/20 ... abies.html

None of this surprises me, even in the slightest. If dolphins are the exceptionally complex creatures we've been told that they are, then their capacity for behaviors that humans traditionally think of as "evil" is going to be present in complex abundance too, right alongside the compassionate behaviors we've also been told that dolphins demonstrate abundantly.

Perhaps they are more human non-human persons than commonly thought...

Very apt.

[brainpanhandler]

To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails.

Clearly Goldstein is anthropomorphizing their behavior. I mean, who knows whether they are really "threatening" movements and "aggressive" noises? And who knows what the intent of the tail "smacking" is. Maybe dolphins like it rough.

But then it stands to reason that the anthropomorphizing extends across the moral spectrum.

Is it necessary to have self consciousness in order for "evil" to exist? Or put another way is it possible to be held to any moral standard without a sense of self?

[Simulist]

Yes. Goldstein makes a number of assumptions that can't even begin to be proven, only supposed by someone whose window to the world appears at times to be conspicuously limiting.

Dolphins are not gentle or psychic. If they could talk they would not impart eco-wisdom or deep spiritual truth. Dolphins are violent predators with a predilection for baby killing and rape.

Hmm. Something tells me that truly understanding the collective mind of the dolphin species might be a bit more complicated than seeing the obvious biases of a graduate student.

[JackRiddler]

To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails.

Clearly Goldstein is anthropomorphizing their behavior. I mean, who knows whether they are really "threatening" movements and "aggressive" noises? And who knows what the intent of the tail "smacking" is.

I quite agree. This article is a response in the mode of traditionalism (conservative, naturalist, essentialist, pessimistic) against the usually romantic (liberal, optimistic, idealized, tolerant) understanding of dolphins. Either interpretation is in reality arguing about humans, about the human self-image of human nature, and will usually have nothing to do with dolphins. False duality and reaction in the service of human needs: Dolphin good! No, dolphin bad! It's not much different when contemporary and usually uninformed observers hash out their competing interpretations of how life might have been among the Western hemisphere indigenes before the European expeditions. On Columbus Day, try saying the discovery was lousy for the indigenes. There'll always be someone who will step up to explain to you, pedantically, that you're romanticizing them, that they were cutting out hearts and raping children and having wars and dying of diseases anyway; to insist on making them, at best, morally equivalent to the European conquerors, to blur the distinction of who invaded and who killed whom; to insinuate, if not to argue explicitly, that as bad people they had it coming or didn't deserve otherwise; and thus to assuage their own feeling of guilt and unease at identifying (irrationally, I might add) with the Europeans of 400-500 years ago more so than with the indigenes, as though any modern person's link to either is a matter defining our identities.

Jehovah at work again, smiting the heathens, and though we do bad things, we are but his tools.

Point is, let us lay aside our reactions, whether these are hopeful or mean. We're not dolphins and we don't know the meanings of their behaviors, but we do know that their behaviors have meanings that they themselves can certainly interpret and abstract. We don't know anything and we won't if we never decipher their language (not that we'd necessarily know much more in that case). But we do know that they have language, that they communicate abstractions (like directions and stories of distant places), that they learn and remember, that they develop, that they make music, and that if killing a human is murder, then so is killing one of them.

[Simulist]

Beautiful writing, Jack. Beautiful truth.

[wordspeak2]

"the current state of human/dolphin interaction (characterized by the deaths and injuries of dolphins in connection with the human fishing industry and the use of captive dolphins by the entertainment industry for therapeutic purposes and by the military) is ethically indefensible."

I totally agree, and I think there might be a shot at this. People love animals. Evidence A: the almost bizarre ubiquity of kitty cats on Reddit. Evidence B: I saw an "Pet Lovers for Obama 2012" ad recently. No joke. Evidence C: A few weeks ago, for the first time in my life, I decided to check out Stormfront. Not a lot of surprises, but I did notice a whole thread of pictures of wild animals. "I could be anywhere on the internet," thought I. Even neo-Nazis like wild animals....

Dolphins have always fascinated me. I'm not an animal rights person, per se, (though I am an animal *welfare* person)... but I do understand where they're coming from, to a degree. The way we relate to other beings defines us perhaps almost as much as our relations to each other. And dolphins are always mythologically saving humans in distress. Well, I'd say our whole species is in distress. Let's save the dolphins, and maybe they'll be some karma. At this point in history, anything's worth a shot!

[DrEvil]

"People love animals"...

I'd say they love cute animals. Like baby seals, polar bears, kittens, and pretty much anything capable of something resembling a human expression. Everything else is free game, because they don't remind us of ourselves. Fish, insects, snakes.. who cares! They're ugly!
Same applies to plants. They're just as alive as you or me, but they're different, which for some reason makes them not count as much as more agile lifeforms (And they're so easy to kill. They're just standing there. Stupid plants).

Edit : Case in point. Look at my picture. Would I be so adorable if that was a picture of a real plankton?

[Simulist]

Case in point. Look at my picture. Would I be so adorable if that was a picture of a real plankton?

First of all, yes you would be adorable, DrEvil. (How could there be any question?!)

Secondly, the first few times I saw your picture, I actually thought that the eyeball was an egg! — presumably because of all the times I've worn egg on my own face.

lol

[DrEvil]

Well, I'm quite used to being metaphorically egged in the face :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2jNzwj8 ... re=related

[Allegro]

.
I finally found it. Many moons ago, I posted a vimeo showing dolphins jetting (jetting?) in front of a speedy boat with music that didn’t overpower the scene. I couldn’t find my post, so back over to vimeo—to page 50. There it was!

Well, all of nature is mysterious to me, so much so that being mesmerized hasn’t been difficult. And that’s how I responded to this video today after all these months.

← Bottlenose Dolphins in Alaska, shot and edited
by David Guilbault. Music by David Wurst.

_________________
I saw your words, JR.
I blushed in return.

Best of all to All.

[Elihu]

BUD
(sweating)
Nice club, Mr. Gekko...

GEKKO
Yeah... not bad for a City College
boy. Bought my way into this club
and now every one of these ivy
league schmucks is sucking my
kneecaps...I just got on the Board
of the Zoological Society, cost me
a million; that's the thing with
WASPS -- they like animals but they
can't stand people!

[brainpanhandler]

To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails.

Clearly Goldstein is anthropomorphizing their behavior. I mean, who knows whether they are really "threatening" movements and "aggressive" noises? And who knows what the intent of the tail "smacking" is.

I quite agree. This article is a response in the mode of traditionalism (conservative, naturalist, essentialist, pessimistic) against the usually romantic (liberal, optimistic, idealized, tolerant) understanding of dolphins. Either interpretation is in reality arguing about humans, about the human self-image of human nature, and will usually have nothing to do with dolphins. False duality and reaction in the service of human needs: Dolphin good! No, dolphin bad! It's not much different when contemporary and usually uninformed observers hash out their competing interpretations of how life might have been among the Western hemisphere indigenes before the European expeditions. On Columbus Day, try saying the discovery was lousy for the indigenes. There'll always be someone who will step up to explain to you, pedantically, that you're romanticizing them, that they were cutting out hearts and raping children and having wars and dying of diseases anyway; to insist on making them, at best, morally equivalent to the European conquerors, to blur the distinction of who invaded and who killed whom; to insinuate, if not to argue explicitly, that as bad people they had it coming or didn't deserve otherwise; and thus to assuage their own feeling of guilt and unease at identifying (irrationally, I might add) with the Europeans of 400-500 years ago more so than with the indigenes, as though any modern person's link to either is a matter defining our identities.

But we do know that they have language (so do birds and squirrels)

that they communicate abstractions (like directions and stories of distant places) (So do ants and bees)

that they learn and remember (so do most animals)

that they develop (so do most animals, even the simplest ones)

that they make music (Hmmm)

and that if killing a human is murder, then so is killing one of them. (Yah, but they just don't respect life the way we do.)

I notice you leave out the criteria of self consciousness, not that you were writing an all inclusive list or anything.