Dolphin Dramas

In the spring of 1986, I traveled to the University of Hawaii at Manoa to study dolphin cognition and language learning at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Lab.  I was invited as part of an Earthwatch internship and as part of an experiential Directed Study credit I was earning at Los Angeles Harbor College.  While I had zealously overpacked for the months’ long visit, the first chore I undertook after arriving in my private, little dorm room was to unpack those bags before going any further.     Unpacking baggage may be a cliche but it is a salient metaphor when learning about marine mammals.   Several of the other interns who had arrived that day, it seemed, carried their baggage with them in the form of preconceived notions as to what dolphins were and proceeded to use those existing frameworks to build a case to defend them.  One girl, a large donor to the Lab’s budget, went immediately to tankside and began to converse telepathically with the two study dolphins.  Later on, she would tell me how she had cued the dolphin with her mind and this had caused the creature to perform bigger, faster and larger backflips.  Another student, a vegetarian, worked with the creatures for a couple of days and then announced that she would no longer assist in work that kept intelligent creatures in captivity.  Another volunteer, a large woman who admitted to singing opera on the side, felt that an appreciative response to her singing would prove whether or not the dolphins were intelligent.  By that standard, I would’ve had to measure my self in low-regard, and the dolphins appeared not only to be unimpressed, but quite agitated at her bellowing.  Her assessment differed, and she smiled at how much she had proven how intelligent dolphins really were by how they had smiled at her aria.

     As for me, even after I finished my internship, I still had undefendable convictions as to whether or not the dolphins were of a higher or completely different intelligence than our human consciousness or whether, due to their high sociability, dolphins only appeared smart because of their innate altruistic tendencies.  There was also a matter of the fish bucket.  If there was a fish to reinforce a desired behavior, a dolphin might just act like the most intelligent being we might ever get to know in this universe.  How could a creature construct its reality if it didn’t possess the ability to see us as we see each other?  Many environmental activists stake their claim by lobbying with  voices for animals who have no voice for themselves.  I remember looking into the dolphin’s smile as simply a ridge of flesh that couldn’t frown even if it wanted to.  I also look at how others construct their narratives of non-humans to conform with their subjective reality.

     In his book, The Lives of Animals, J.M. Coetzee described his character Elizabeth Costello’s polemical visit to a conference on philosophy, much like his own visits to the Tanner Lectures at Princeton during the years 1977 to 1978.  At the Appleton College conference, Costello spoke with eloquence and passion balanced with a disdain for the abuse of all animals.   Costello’s lecture took the scholars by surprise; the lecture was supposed to be one relevant to literature and literary criticism, not one of the philosophical differences between man and beast.  Humans had been, Costello implied, semantically differentiated from animal as an unreasoning Other and not one of a fellow in kind.  Slightly paraphrasing Costello, “What is so special about the form of [human] consciousness we recognize that makes killing [humans] a crime?” (Coetzee 5). The Appleton audience, as a party of philosophers with human reason their realm, could be excused from excluding non-humans from the debates.  A party of philosophers had to adopt a theory of mind, the kind of intelligent talent which allowed one person “to think ourselves into the being of another” in order to frame their arguments and find their insights (4).

     However, the ability to think oneself into the being of the non-human, which can be the simple definition of anthropomorphism, has been banned and exiled from philosophical debate since Rene Descartes.  The separation of man from nature in the “I think, therefore I am,” became one, great hegemonic memeplex.  By that I mean that Coetzee, as Costello, had taken

critical scholars to task for allowing the same unsympathetic, abusive thought to replicate like a virus and gain cohesion in our society.  In the introduction to The Lives of Animals, Amy Gutman describes the intended affect of juxtapositioning philosophy, literature and literary criticism with the topic of animal abuse by paraphrasing Coetzee’s Princeton Lecture; “We have closed our hearts to animals … philosophy, [Costello] argues, is relatively powerless … to lead in the right direction, because it lags our sympathies.  This places the burden on something other than our rational faculties, to which philosophy typically appeals.”  If philosophers will not debate for the animal, it becomes vital that some voice will.  Coetzee believes it is in our “sympathetic imagination” in literature that we can act as vanguard to the objective philosophical debates that have allowed humans to “do anything [with regards to animals] and get away with it” (Coetzee 4).

     There has been no dearth in this “sympathetic imagination” when it comes to the stories about whales and dolphins.  The Order Cetacea encompasses all baleen whales and toothed whales and dolphins but two particular species are the subjects of a majority of fictional and non-fictional narratives: Orcinus orca, the killer whale and Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin.  While there are numerous species of Cetacea in the ocean worth writing about, these two species are icons and as familiar to popular culture as Willy of the film franchise Free Willy and of Flipper, the bottlenose dolphin of the 1960’s television melodrama.  There was also another 1990’s Flipper movie remake.   Screenwriters were able to prescribe a theory of mind to these marine mammals that reflected back a Lacanian alienated other.   The increasingly postmodern culture of the 1960’s began to question the rationality of the Cartesian hegemony and the "dogma of otherness" (to quote science fiction writer David Brin) began its first serious discourse, in which the idea of dolphin "superintelligence" got its first serious hearing with the dolphin studies done by Dr. John Lilly (Brin 1).  In 1993, T.J. Eddy in The Journal of Social Issues found that human beings attributed a theory of mind only to those species that looked similar to humans from a mirror-like perspective (i.e. primates) or those that had been infantilized, in pets like cats and dogs, through breeding and domestication (Povinelli 325).  Cetaceans, I've found, have not only developed a mystique surrounding their consciousness in popular culture, but many writers have taken the idea of their consciousness to the cosmic level.

     Anthropomorphizing animals and things in poetic narrative has been a normal and necessary part of moral discourse and writers have been creating shamans and villains out of asses and elephants long before the idea of a theory of mind existed.   In the second century B.C., Greek Izaak Walton, Oppian of Cilicia, wrote a poem of the source of moral integrity in dolphins:

Diviner than the dolphin is nothing yet created; for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals, but by the devising of Dionysus they exchanged the land for the sea and put on the form of fishes; but even now the righteous spirit of men in them preserves human thought and human deeds.

     The “devising of Dionysus” to which Oppian referred was a punishment, stating that dolphins were what remained of Tyresian pirates who, having kidnapped Zeus’ son, lost their manhood as soon as they jumped into the ocean to save themselves.  Oppian emphasized the transformation from human to beast was an “Ill hour it was for them!” (Clarke 3).   The pirate part drowned and only what was divine in humankind survived in the form of a dolphin.   According to Marcia Clark in her book, The Dolphin Smile, another storyteller gave a different human beginning to dolphins, again as divine punishment for the Egyptians who pursued the Israelites into the Red Sea; “[they were] turned into dolphins and doomed to wander the sea until the end of time” (3).

     Poets and philosophers diverged as philosophers went down the path toward the science behind the theory of mind while the artists’ narrative were both objective but more subjective.   “An artist's perception of nature is different than a scientist's” states Jim Nollman, the founder of Interspecies, an organization dedicated to breaking down the boundaries between the objective and subjective perspectives in art and science.  

"Biologists operate by the logic of perceiving the world objectively, symbolizing their experience as numbers and objects, doing their best to stand outside and separate, peeking in at nature, albeit observantly, sincerely, wholeheartedly.

But to view nature from a perceived outside vantage also voids it of subject; diminishing a sense of personal connectedness, feeling, kinship, obligation, intuition, and other forms of direct relating. It is the way nature is commonly perceived in our culture. The objective vantage is the worldview overwhelmingly promoted by our educational system, the basis of most environmental policy and legislation, and the grounding of an economic system that denies intrinsic value to the natural world it so skillfully plunders. Our legal system basically categorizes nature as an aspect of property law. This objective vantage is so deeply entrenched within our culture, that many people believe it is the only valid way to perceive our relationship with nature." (Nollman)

     Niels Einarsson, a 20th century Icelandic sociologist, took a more objective look at cetaceans from the point of view of the fishermen culture, intruded upon by the environmentalist and very anthropomorphic-minded dolphin environmentalist culture. “The Icelandic fisherman’s view of animals and nature is basically utilitarian and anthropocentric.  Within such a framework, there is little room for romantic experiences of oneness with nature” (76).  To these small Icelandic cultures, any marine animal caught without extrinsic commercial value is called drasl, or trash.  In the 1990’s, Icelandic fishermen labelled orcas’ “fish-eating demons,” which matched with their Latin name Orcinus orca, which means demon of the deep.     Actions to prevent fishermen from whaling, Einarsson states, are “motivated by an irrational, over-emotional anthropomorphic belief in the sacredness of what are sarcastically referred to internationally in the rhetoric of cynical reason as mediagenic megafauna.” 

(Brydon 233).

     The term such as “mediagenic megafauna,” (meaning photogenic big animals) could make a French cinematographer and oceanographer roll over in his grave, yet Jacques Cousteau enchanted his television viewer audiences’ with his own graceful images of whales and dolphins matched with his eloquent words.  The very last of Cousteau’s published books before his death in 1997, The Human, The Orchid and The Octopus, ended with the message of what he had witnessed in dolphin behavior, showing the remaining bits of the Tyresian pirate that Dionysus had failed to expel (223). 

"As gentle as dolphins are, their young are hellions in the ways they wield their claim to what I like to call fluid territory.  They storm the sea like unruly teenagers, the punks of the marine world.  In the Indian Ocean, we watched a pod of young dolphins plundering everything, eating everything, frightening everything, wildly and savagely breaking all the zoological rules (wild creatures almost never otherwise squander food).  The nervous energy of these youth demand to be spent; wrack, ruin, waste are their instruments of catharsis … Young tuna, squid, the cod … they all charge like Mongolian Huns into quiet little seafloor villages, marauding and ransacking the abodes of the peasantry, which scamper into their peepholes and emerge to pick up the debris when the ocean’s underaged Atillas have swept on.” (284-285).      Looking back to Coetzee’s lecture to his Princeton critics, when he spoke in Costello’s voice, it’s clear that Cousteau fit the mold of the poet, “Unlike philosophers, poets begin “with a feel for” an animal’s experience …,”  Lisa Gutman then adds in the same passage, “Costello urges us to recognize the accessibility of such sympathy for the fullness of the animal being” (5).  Cousteau, unlike the Icelandic fisherman and much less saccharine than the Free Willy and Flipper screenwriters, described both the better and the worse sides of the literary dolphin.  Those writers who have actually experienced the poet through the cetaceans’ voice have used their narrative voice with a Rashomon effect, where the same subjective event cannot be described in purely objective terms. Those humans with dreams of dolphin goodness may experience a self-fulfilling prophecy or they may simply ignore the warning signs when swimming with an unpredictable, wild animal.   At their peril, trainers and handlers have made grave errors by ignoring the fact that dolphins and killer whales are not domesticated or feral animals.

     The Sea World franchise had, for a time, given up the Hollywood-scripted shows of killer whales dancing on cue, where they once performed more like pink-tutu wearing bears in the old, Russian circuses than trained wild animals for an edutainment. In May, 2006, Sea World launched a new off-microphone, narrated performance called “Believe.”  The story, a fictional tale, tells of a young boy who dreams of whales and then carves a Maori-inspired whale-tale out of wood.  He makes the wooden icon into a pendant, which he wears as a talisman until he grows up to become a killer whale trainer at Sea World, at one with his black and white companions.  During the high-concept performance, the trainer, wearing a matching black-and-white designer wetsuit, would go through a repertoire of skills that have long been the staple of marine mammal performances. 

       The performance ends after the trainer brings out a young attendee to the whale platform.  The trainer continues scripted cues to include the child as part of the fictional boy’s dream, as long as that chosen child and the audience continue to “Believe” in the power of the talisman.  Upon exiting the bleachers, the crowds can filter through to the gift shop to buy their very own wood talisman pendant.

     Unfortunately, the whales’ performance often incorporates the Stanislavsky style of method acting and the whales have, on more than one occasion, chosen to perform behaviors off-script, breaking the intended spell of “Believe”-ing.   Six months after the opening of “Believe,” a killer whale attacked his trainer, dragging him down to the bottom of the tank and holding him there.  It was not the first time a killer whale had followed its natural tendencies, disregarding all the training and scripting when something triggers an aggressive, behavioral response.   As an aside, I wrote this paper months before a Sea World Orca named Tilikum tragically killed one of its handlers during a "Believe" performance.

      Don C. Reed, the Chief Scuba Diver for Marine World/Africa USA in Redwood City and later, in Vallejo, California, wrote about both the best and the near-worst scenarios which constructed a poetic, yet still very real, narrative of these captive cetaceans in his book Notes from an Underwater Zoo:

"A shadow spread coolness on my back.  I turned and saw the inside of [the whale’s] mouth.  The teeth like ivory thumbs.  The enormous tongue.  The pink and black-spotted gullet ...

The nervousness rose in me, even before something clamped on the back of my thigh.  High up, just before the buttock and groin…  Nobody had to whisper what had grabbed me.  I knew to hold very still, so as not awaken the feeding response.  For what would a killer whale automatically do to a struggling lunch?...  Rotating my head very slowly so as not to twitch my fragile leg, I turned back to see [the whale’s] truckhood-sized snout.  Limitless power, poised… My lower limb numbed.  I thought about the great femoral artery, the pipeline of blood that winds around and through the thigh…  Oddly, though, I could not feel the individual points of his teeth.  I had no information to judge with (never having been eaten by a whale before), but the generalized squeeze felt almost as if he held me in his gums.”  (42-43).

 Reed also narrates his best experience in a subjective voice which constructs the complex make-up of “killer” cetaceans.  When reaching out to touch a different whale, Reed’s narrative re-created the reality of the situation against an emotional backdrop;

"As my hand approached her gently pointed snout, I felt a fuzzy, prickling force around her, like an aura.  I shoved my hand through the energy and touched [the whale].  Her eye took me over as if it was on a movie screen 20 feet across.  Her red-brown eye with flecks of gold, overlaid with a blue sheen ….

   Just for a moment ego left me.  I felt like a small, insignificant monkey, crouching before the ocean, staring out at unknowable all.  I felt the foolishness of the vanity that makes us think we were the first and only rulers of the earth.” (13)

Reed immediately follows with a qualification to his subjective metanarrative:

"Now it is the nature of humans to put labels on unlabelable things and to attribute their own emotions to other life forms.  Anthropomorphization, the scientists call it.  I cannot say if I am right about what the whale felt.  Maybe when I looked into her eye and thought I shared her soul, she was only thinking about food"  (13).

   This was a moment-to-moment experience, this meeting with the whale, as opposed to what occurred in the "make-Believe" show at Sea World, where marketing and design had more to do with audience reaction than the reality of what unfolded at the moment.    Sea World trainers were ill-prepared for the un-scripted performances of their cetaceans because their constructed "prophecy" of human-dolphin connection was not only not self-fulfilling, but also unnecessarily fatal. 

     The difficulty of narrative designed to sell the idea of transformative exchange with marine mammals and the actual experience of the narrator becomes blurred when authors describe suppositions as real acts as is the case with author Bonnie Morton, who spiritually channeled an entire book for Keiko, the killer whale.  The book is marketed as non-fiction with Keiko, the whale himself, given full author’s credit.  The channeler, Norton, goes on to offer psychic services for interspecies communication for anyone interested in paying a fee.

     Taking into account Don C. Reed’s narratives, the tragic history of cetaceans in captivity as can be found in Wikipedia, along with Keiko and Bonnie Norton and others’ accounts of cetacean telepathy and channeling consciousness, the construction of the thinking animal in beasts’ bodies becomes an unwieldy entity (Corky... Wiki).  It seems almost impossible to have an objective experience with the sympathetic imagination that  Coetzee demanded of his critical literary thinkers and hypothetical audience of philosophers.   Narratives of subjective experiences overlap and connect at points and then oppose and disperse at others.  Reed felt the oneness of Nortons’ experience but also recognized the dangerous reality of the Sea World trainers’ experiences.   Libby Layne, an author who also works with children with disabilities, described those same overlaps in subjective narrative when she went out into the field, on a boat in the Indian Ocean following cetologist Horace Dobbs in his research on dolphins in the wild:

"Dr. Nakagawa, Horace [Dobbs]’s guest, is considered a healer, using what the Japanese call ki energy, or Chi in Chinese.  This energy, they believe, is the life force that causes people to be healthy; blockage or misuse of this ki energy causes illness.  Dr. Dobbs is exploring the possibility that dolphins may also have this energy.  He wonders if this might be a factor in what he has observe when people with depression seem to be healed when they swim with the dolphins.

     There will be experiments using this Ki energy with people on board.  It is not required that anyone attend the sessions or believe any of the energy theories.  I am not really sure about all of this “woo, woo” as I call it. I find it particularly suspect when one of the Japanese begins “channeling” the dolphins, who are telling her when they’ll show up.  She only speaks Japanese, so I suppose that dolphins are multilingual.  I keep an open mind, however, and enjoy hearing both the new information and becoming aware of my own limits in what I will accept as truth.  I am comfortable simply enjoying the dolphins… in my frolicking with the dolphins I am taken back to that childlike place of wonder and enchantment.  The [experience] had been as near heaven as anything I had experienced on earth." (117)

     Layne’s non-fiction narrative has that healthy dose of objective skepticism about dolphin telepathy and channeling like those Bonnie Norton described in Keiko's book,  but she also accepts, like Reed, that she has had a very subjective experience.   Layne meta-narrates her story to allow her audience to re-construct the dolphins differently than Reed or the Sea World trainers were able to when they worked with whales in captivity.   Layne brings her own framework, her own baggage, in that her narrative is founded in a Christian, religious worldview.  This brings the narrative explorations back in a moebius strip-like path to the spiritually lighter side of the previously dark religious icons.  I am speaking of the Tyresian pirates, the aquatically exiled Egyptians, and even the yet unmentioned, but well known, Herman Melville’s great, white whale.

    Finally, the non-fiction narrative voice of Lynne Cox’s in her novel Grayson, recalls the time when she was 17 years old, she bonded to a baby gray way while swimming off the shore in Seal Beach, California.  Out in the wild and without the support of a boat, Cox tried to understand the connection she felt in attempting to keep the infant whale from following her in to shore, which he seemed intent to do: