My Dolphin is Smarter Than Your Honor Student

by Stephanie Feldstein · 2010-03-01 12:00:00 UTC
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The death of a trainer at SeaWorld last week has raised a lot of questions about the morality of keeping killer whales in marine parks. (Well, for some ... while animal activists are calling for changes at SeaWorld, the park has decided the show must go on.) But killer whales aren't the only frustrated performers. Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University who has been researching dolphin intelligence, says that these marine parks and other tourist attractions using captive marine mammals need to be reconsidered.

Marino found that many dolphin brains are highly complex, including an expanse of neocortical volume that is more convoluted than our own. That would be the wrinkles in the brain that are credited for much of humanity's "superior" intelligence.

"Dolphins are sophisticated, self-aware, highly intelligent beings with individual personalities, autonomy and an inner life," says Marino. "They are vulnerable to tremendous suffering and psychological trauma." Which, she points out, is a likely side effect of being captured and confined for entertainment.

As the science world is contemplating the ethics of how we treat our intellectual peers of the ocean, they're also discovering that dolphins and humans have some significant physiological similarities, too. They've found that dolphins can be a model for a whole host of human diseases, including exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment, diabetes, epilepsy, and certain viruses previously believed to only exist in  humans.

Both of these dolphin-human revelations were being shared at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and I hope that the brain scientists and the disease scientists continue to have a dialogue. Because it's one thing to recognize dolpins as canaries in the coal mine — to shed light on ocean health and how it affects human health — but these similarities can't be used as an excuse to round up the animals for lab research.

We should learn more about what's harming dolpins so we can better protect them in the wild, and the human interest in self-preservation can help make that happen. But as Marino's studies show, protection also means not subjecting them to the psychological trauma of being entertainers, tourist attractions, or test subjects. If they were the ones with opposable thumbs and harpoons, how would they be treating us?

Photo credit: Andrew

Stephanie Feldstein is a Change.org Editor who has been part of the animal welfare and rescue community for over a decade, and most recently worked for an environmental organization.
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