By Susan Casey
Doubleday, NY, 2015, 320pp.
Casey, author of very interesting books on waves (her best
work) and great white sharks, here recounts her efforts to more about our
aquatic analogues, the dolphins. It is a
personal journey, and some sections are more compelling than others, but it’s a
trip worth taking.
Casey is enraptured with the animals, and that’s understandable.
She witnessed everything from hunting and captivity to the exhilaration of
open-ocean encounters off Hawaii, and there’s a very interesting closing
section on how dolphins were venerated and memorialized in art by the Minoans and
their neighbors. She talks to some
top-rank scientists like Robin Baird and Lori Marino, but she says her
curiosity could not be satisfied in labs and tanks, only in the ocean.
Casey tells us early on that it’s easy to “go down the
rabbit hole” with the mystical side of human-dolphin interaction, and down she
goes, offering a sympathetic portrait of the brilliant but bizarre John C.
Lilly (kudos to her for digging through his personal archives and not relying
just on secondary sources) and spending time in Hawaii with Joan Ocean, who
holds that dolphins are “multidimensional beings” with wisdom beyond our
imagination. The most fascinating bit,
scientifically, is her discussion of dolphin brains with Lori Marino. The
dolphin brain “design,” Dr. Marino explains, is very different from our own. It
prioritizes speedy processing and reactions as well as sensory inputs. The book includes numerous examples of
dolphin intelligence, some of them pretty startling. It also features tales of dolphins rescuing
people: as Casey notes, this implies animals, for some reason, sometimes see us
as kin.
There are heartbreaking chapters on the slaughter and
captivity of dolphins in the centers of the live-dolphin trade, Taiji Cove
(Japan) and the Solomons, where Casey, at some personal risk, meets the brave
and dedicated people trying to stop the carnage. (Her description of the “Whale Museum” in
Taiji is otherworldly, an example of how humans can warp their perceptions even
about things they’ve personally witnessed.)
She looks at some of the marine parks where mistreatment and tragedy
have occurred, including in Canada and the United States. She speaks to
ex-trainers, most famously Ric O’Barry,
whose dolphins I once saw perform as “Flipper.” She denounces the “swim with
dolphins” programs, which she shows include extreme confinement of the animals
to make sure they’re available. A welcome counterpoint is her visit to Dingle,
Ireland, to see Fungie, a bottlenose who has seemingly adopted the town and has
spent 30-plus years interacting with the people who venture out to see
him.
This is a personal journey and not a treatise, but a few
omissions seem odd. Casey never asks current dolphin trainers for their views -
I agree with her that captivity should be phased out, but castigating it
without those voices oversimplifies things.
She notes that dolphins are not all happy and gentle creatures, but
ignores the details. Bottlenose dolphin females are forced into sexual congress
by groups of males that ram them, bite them, and tail-bash them to make them
submit. Some newborn calves are batted through the air and rammed until they
die. Many other mammals do similar things, but there is a bit too much rosiness
in the portrait of dolphins. Casey doesn’t entirely embrace the more extreme
metaphysical beliefs, but there’s no skeptical counterpoint, either. Ancient
and modern indigenous people who honor or commune with dolphins are celebrated,
but the ones that killed and ate them go unmentioned.
Again, though, this comes back to being Casey’s own attempt
to learn more and connect more with dolphins and it helps that she’s a very
good observer and writer. Dolphins are
fascinating, and Casey shows us many of the reasons why. The book’s omissions
make me think she loves her subject too much, but that’s not the worst of
sins. If this is not the whole story of
humans and dolphins, it’s a compelling and often memorable chapter. There’s a good set of chapter notes
(neglected by many modern writers) and a bibliography.
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