We’ve been told that dolphins are the smartest creature after humans.
Apparently it’s not true! We’ve been conned by the dolphin’s smile and stories of its social and sometimes helpful behaviour.
That’s according to Justin Gregg, a biologist and researcher with the Dolphin Communication Project, who has just written a book “Are dolphins really smart?” in which he challenges previous scientific research.
Dolphins show many complex behaviours such as living in large groups, showing empathy and communicating with their peers but such behaviours are also found in other animals such as chickens, pigs, and bears.
So dolphins are not so special after all it seems and furthermore have a propensity to be violent towards their fellow cetaceans such as porpoises.
The book comes out at a time when some academics are calling for more protection and moral rights for dolphins based on their brain power. Only last year scientists called for them to be classed as non-human persons.
The idea that dolphins were special dates back to the 1950s when neuroscientist John Lilly wondered why they had such large brains and experimented on them convinced they were trying to communicate with him in dolphinese. The television series Flipper contributed to their popularity in the 1960s. And in the past both American and Russian navies have used trained dolphins for marine warfare purposes.
Gregg thinks that in some respects they are less sophisticated than chickens having no distress or food calls. And bottle-nosed dolphins have been recorded killing harbour porpoises, seemingly for the fun of it as they don’t eat them. In Australia groups of male dolphins have been observed isolating females and forcibly mating with them.
My only experience of dolphins, swimming with them in Cuba, was a painful experience when one of them (pictured) thrashed my leg with it’s tail giving me a dead-leg in the water. Very painful but I put it down to the young creature’s mischievousness and went back in for a second session. Looking back I’m not so sure!
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