Here’s an article on the thing about their intelligence, by the way, and this is my favorite bit:
“
Dolphins’ revered status among animals really began with John Lilly, a
1960’s era dolphin researcher and psychotropic drug enthusiast who was
the first to popularize the idea that dolphins are intelligent, later
suggesting that they were even more so than humans.“
THIS ISN’T THE HALF OF IT BY THE WAY, this guy also believed Dolphins could project supernatural holograms across time and space and he conducted experiments, on taxpayer money, where humans gave dolphins handjobs.
(my meandering reply got too long so I’m just turning it into a reblog)
As someone big on dolphins for their eerie intelligence, the history of bullshit claims and research and association with psychedelia, and their capacity for cruelty and drug use and other
nasty things, I’m not seeing much in this article that refutes the idea
of cetacean intelligence, it just seems to call into question some (simplified versions of) methods that have been used in the past to try to gauge/prove it.The guy making the big counter-claims, Justin Gregg, is someone who’s proven to be extremely petty and salty about dolphin intelligence in the past and I’ve mocked him for it before actually. Most of his actual criticism boils down to “I don’t like john lilly, I don’t like dolphins because people like them too much. some parrots and birds show similar intelligence and social behavior therefore dolphins are BIRD BRAINED FOOLS.” This is a man who thinks that comparing an animal’s language skills to an African Grey is a diss instead of a compliment.
One of the frustrating things about dolphin
research is that if you claim dolphins are any smarter than a brick thrown into the ocean, people
will start talking about John Lilly no matter why you claimed what you did. John Lilly was a weird and nasty
fucker and he killed the reputation of the field for decades to come, but using “John Lilly was a dingus” to argue dolphins aren’t intelligent feels like a projection of spite for another person onto an ultimately unrelated animal. Because he did some of the earliest dolphin intelligence research, people act like he invented dolphin intelligence itself so it must be fake because John Lilly is a loopy bastard. Like, of course John Lilly’s claims of dolphins being magic hologram projecting astral adventurers are wrong, but that doesn’t mean that everything he said down to the simplest claim of “dolphins may be smarter than we think” was actually the exact opposite of true. Dolphins can be smart and John Lilly can be wrong at the same time.
Don’t go after the cetaceans with an ad hominem attack.
Mooncustafer 