Ethical Considerations

“They are complex, social, intelligent, family-oriented predators, with minds and lives and moods of their own, who are inherently unsuited to confinement in concrete tanks. That realization is where we should be now in our own evolution in knowledge and compassion in the 21st century.

-Dr. Naomi Rose, HSUS Scientist, in an interview with Resident Media Pundit (March 2010) about the killer whale attack at SeaWorld in February 2010.

INTELLIGENCE

A wealth of evidence supports that marine mammals are extremely intelligent. The dolphin brain is much larger than primates and, when compared to body size, is second in size only to humans (Marino 1998). The fact that marine mammals, particularly dolphins, are intelligent provides the primary foundation for ethical arguments against captivity. Unfortunately, dolphins’ ability to learn and understand human commands this is the very reason captive facilities take advantage of these animals. Below are some examples of dolphin intelligence:

Abstract Concepts
Scientific studies have shown that dolphin can distinguish between numbers of objects (i.e., “few” or “many”). This ability has always been thought to be uniquely human and possibly related to the possession of complex language skills.

Self-recognition
Dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, demonstrating self-awareness. Researchers placed a mark on the bodies of bottlenose dolphins using zinc oxide. Then they placed a mirror in front of the dolphins, which the animals used to view themselves, often investigating their marked-up body parts. This shows that dolphins are self-aware, or that they can recognize their reflection as an image of itself, not as another animal or inanimate object.

Communication & ‘Language' Comprehension
Dolphins and other toothed whales live in very complex societies. They have the ability to communicate and collaborate among pod members in order to forage, reproduce, and ultimately survive. Pods can sometimes number in the 1000’s of animals – dolphins have social strategies that help them recognize other individuals and relationships (e.g., alliances and kin).

Some dolphins are thought to have their own “language.” Bottlenose dolphins have demonstrated individual whistling sounds (comparable to having a human name), which is used to identify and call individuals in a pod. This ability is especially important to moms that get separated from calves while they are off hunting for food. Aside from humans, dolphins are the only other animals known to communicate in this way. Not only do individuals possess distinctive sounds, but there also seems to be pod-specific dialects. Orcas for example have been shown to produce repetitious sounds specific to their pod. These pod-specific calls can remain unchanged for decades, making communication within a pod extremely efficient.

Learning and Memory
Louis Herman, a marine mammal researcher, was able to teach bottlenose dolphins sign language and computer-generated language in the 1980s. Not only did the dolphins understand simple language, but they could also understand sentence structure. It seems that dolphins have learned our language, but humans have still not been able to decode dolphin “language” – which species do you think is smarter?

Read more about dolphin intelligence:

Dolphin social intelligence: complex alliance relationships in bottlenose dolphins and a consideration of selective environments for extreme brain size evolution in mammals (PDF, 453KB)

A claim in search of evidence: reply to Manger’s thermogenesis hypothesis of cetacean brain structure (PDF, 301KB)

Cetaceans Have Complex Brains for Complex Cognition (PDF, 1.3MB)

LIVE CAPTURES

Extremely violent whale and dolphin captures still occur around the world and are so traumatizing to the animals, injury or death is often the outcome. For example, mortality rates of bottlenose dolphins are 6x greater during the first 5 days of confinement due to capture-related stress (WSPA/HSUS 2009). The drive fishery is perhaps the most cruel capture method, where dolphins are herded into shallow water by boats and either brutally killed for consumption or sold into the multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry.

In the wild, dolphins and small whales live and travel in close-knit social units called pods. They forage as a group and provide protection for one another. Mothers and offspring stay together for as many as 8 years. Whether captured from their natural environment, or shipped over long distances from one facility to another, family bonds are routinely – and prematurely – broken.

If you are interested in learning more about the brutal captures of wild dolphins, see the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove. It exposes Japan’s drive hunts that slaughter 20,000 dolphins and porpoises every year. The documentary concentrates on Taiji, a small Japanese village town where about 2,000 dolphins are herded into a small hidden cove and brutally slaughtered for their meat every year. Some of the animals are captured alive and sold to aquaria, theme parks, or swim-with-the-dolphin programs around the world. Live dolphin’s can be worth as much as $140,000 and the dolphin entertainment industry is the primary economic incentive for these brutal drive hunts to go on.

Check out TakePart.com’s celebrity public service announcement inspired by The Cove.