An article in a German magazine pouring cold water on some of the wilder speculation or claims about the capacity of dolphins, especially as to the extent of their intelligence, will annoy some people, but gives some information. And splendid pictures. Dolphin tourism, the writer admits is a huge enterprise world wide, and harmless in itself. And swimming with dolphins. He mentions 150,000 people coming in a year to see Fungi at Dingle. In America, of course, in Australia; while in New Zealand, at Kaikoura, tourists can go on helicopter trips to see "the Einsteins of the Seas." Generally the claims about their intelligence is nonsense. Dogs can be taught tricks too. The lack of intelligence of dolphins, a retired zoologist is quoted as saying, can be shown by the fact that for years and years dolphins swam into the same bay in the Faroe Islands, where they had been slaughtered for hundreds of years. And dolphins regularly get stranded when they swim into took shallow water. They send out distress signals and others join them, either from curiosity or to help, and they too, become stuck.
Naturally, says the same man, they can communicate among themselves. So can chaffinches. The director of an organisation for research into sea mammals' compares their learning capacity with that of chimpanzees. Not so bad. Says another: dolphins have the brain of any normal, middling mammal. Just 20let them be animals.
The writer of the article reasons that the dolphin seems to represent an ideal projection surface for the longings of a society which has driven away all wild life from itself; for whom animals play a role only as food or a living toy. For them, a dolphin represents freedom, strength, the highest intelligence in harmony with the basic element, water. Flipper, the writer says, the friend of all children, becomes a cultural symbol of the New Age. The sacred cow of the sea. That's our author Bernhard Borgeest. Well, he does go on a bit, but certainly contacts with any wild animal can be either soothing or stimulating to people who live in modern urban life. And such contact brings a sense of curiosity and even mystery, the mystery of the whole living universe.
And, of so many creatures, dolphins are exhilarating to the point of being spectacular. You don't have to believe that they have supernatural powers to enjoy looking at them, in the flesh or on film. This is in the magazine of Die Zeit for March 1st. Lovely pictures by Flip Nicklin.