The Dolphin in the Mirror

by Diana Reiss

  Finally, a couple of months after the 2005 Society for Marine Mammalogy meeting in San Diego and almost exactly one year after our ill-fated visit to the Japanese embassy, a glimmer of hope broke through the dark clouds. "Hello, Diana, this is Louie Psihoyos," said the voice on the phone. I was standing in the foyer of our apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Several months had passed since I had pleaded my case to Louie in San Diego, and I had almost given up hope that anything would come of it. "Diana, I'm in New York," Louie continued. "I'm at JFK airport. I'm on my way to Japan. We're going to do the film. Wish me luck!" For the first time in months, I felt truly exhilarated and once again hopeful. I punched the air in the way young people sometimes do when they're really excited and shouted, "Yes!" Juvenile, I know, but that's how I felt.

  ***

  The project on which Louie embarked that day was no ordinary documentary, for several reasons. First, with Jim Clark's fortune* bankrolling the effort, the final product would be as slick as any Hollywood feature film, complete with special effects. Second, with the fishermen, the town council, and the town's police force on high alert to prevent access to the killing area by whatever means was necessary, Louie's team found themselves under more than the usual degree of production stress. "Four years ago, through Jim, I met Steven Spielberg," Louie told an interviewer for indieWIRE at the beginning of 2009. Louie went on to say that, thanks to his experience with Jaws, the filmmaker had advised him never to make a movie that required boats or animals, and Louie now had his own advice to add to Spielberg's: "Never make a movie where the subjects want to kill you and you have to work in the middle of the night to break the law while the police are on your tail." That had been Louie's experience in making The Cove.

  The fishermen's determination to prevent Louie from getting access to the killing cove was just one obstacle. A second was its fortresslike topography: steep cliffs on three sides and open ocean on the fourth. A team of Navy SEALs would have been helpful, but the production team didn't have that option. So Louie turned to his longtime diving friends Mandy-Rae Cruickshank and her husband, Kirk Krack, to swim into the cove, plant underwater cameras and microphones, and then return undetected, all without benefit of scuba equipment. Cruickshank and Krack are no ordinary divers. They are among the world's best free divers; that is, they dive to great depths without using any breathing apparatus. Cruickshank is capable of diving three hundred feet and is able to hold her breath for as long as six minutes, a near-dolphinlike performance!

  Louie persuaded his first photo assistant—the head mold maker at Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas's legendary special effects company—to make fake rocks with high-definition cameras and microphones embedded in them. Intrepid team members, wearing camouflage and military-style face paint to elude the ever-vigilant police, installed them on the craggy cliff sides near the head of the cove. (Louie said that the fake rocks were so good that his team had a hard time finding them after the filming was done.) Another critical team member was Simon Hutchins, a former Canadian Air Force avionics technician; he organized the underwater expeditions and was the technical wizard behind the drone-carried, gyro-stabilized camera. A team of expert surfers, led by the legendary Dave "Rasta" Rastovich, and a clandestine-operations organizer completed the production company. A motley crew, you might say. "We're all professionals," observed Hutchins, "just not at filmmaking." Louie called his crew the Ocean's Eleven, a reference to the 1960 Rat Pack caper film and the 2001 remake of that name.

  The Cove was released in the fall of 2009 to instant acclaim. There was some criticism that it was "too evangelical," which was not surprising because it had been Louie's stated aim to "put a stop to the most ghastly slaughter of animals on the planet." It garnered a top prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the following March won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2010 Oscars. In the ninety-minute film, there were fewer than two minutes of footage showing the actual killings; it was what one might call a Disney version of what really went on every year at Taiji. Louie noted that he had much more horrifying footage, but it was simply too graphic to show. As gruesome as it is onscreen, the reality is worse, I can assure you. I was a science adviser for the film and was delighted that it did so well.

  The only problem I had with the film was that it carried more of an anti-aquarium sentiment than I thought it should. I was trying hard to build the strongest possible international movement to bring an end to the drives. My goal was (and still is) to unite the largest possible consortium of scientists, animal-care professionals, and animal-welfare NGOs such as the Humane Society of the United States, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society of the UK, and the Earth Island Institute in San Francisco in a science-based call to stop the slaughter. The taking of dolphins from the drive by any aquarium or organization for commercial, educational, or research purposes is unconscionable. Yet the film attacks all aquariums in one swooping condemnation, suggesting that all aquariums obtain their dolphins from the drive. This is far from the truth. Just to set the record straight, aquariums in the United States are committed to caring for the dolphins in their facilities. They participate in cooperative breeding and artificial insemination programs, moving sperm rather than animals to maintain a healthy genetic pool. I am unaware of any U.S. aquarium that has procured a dolphin from the wild in more than twenty years.

  The oversimplifications and implications in the film alienated many aquariums, which are important allies in the mission to end the drives. The film, ironically, damaged the overall cause—and weakened, at least temporarily, our coalition.

  Changes in thinking, cultural and scientific, often take time. We need a sea change in how dolphins are viewed in the parts of the world that continue to regard them as commodities, as expendable, and even as pests to be exterminated. Most aquariums in the United States (and in a few other countries) place high value on healthy dolphins living in a social network of mothers and young and other pool mates. These aquariums need to increase their pressure to stop those renegade aquariums that still take dolphins from the wild.

  The Cove was shown at the Tokyo Film Festival in October 2009 to a muted response. Plans for wider release in the country met with vigorous protests from nationalist groups declaring that any movie-house owner who showed the film was a traitor to Japanese honor. Violence was threatened. Eventually, half a dozen movie houses showed the film; no violence occurred. Nor was there a popular uprising against the killing—or at least, not as of the closing weeks of 2010. The Taiji Municipal Council arranged a carefully controlled, media-free meeting with a selected group of animal rights activists that November. The townspeople stuck to their position. Although the drive was suspended for a few days in the September after the film's release, it has been business as usual ever since. The council's president said at the November 2010 meeting, "We believe that these are natural resources, to be used effectively." He still doesn't get it! But I, for one, am not giving up.

  10. Ending the Long Loneliness

  One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

  —LOREN EISELEY

  I HAVE TAUGHT a course for many years now, variously called Animal Communication and Cognition, Animal Minds, and Communication between Humans and Other Animals. No matter the title, the purpose is always the same: to explore how we look for intelligence in other animals and ask an old question: Do animals think? I start the course talking about how as early as the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle had classified the natural world and described man's relationship to other animals in his concept of the Ladder of Nature,* a Platonic version of souls in which plants were endowed with vegetative souls, responsible for reproduction and growth; animals (a class that did not include humans) had both vegetative and sensitive souls, which oversaw mobility and sensation; while humans, in splendid isolation, were the sole possessors of rational souls, which endowed us alone in nature with the capacity for thought and reflection.

&nbs
p; We journey onward into the thirteenth-century world of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who accepted the Aristotelian scale of being, yet, foreshadowing Darwin, also envisioned a degree of continuity between humans and other animals. Although he saw man as alone and superior to animals in having an intellective soul, he saw the powers of man as not so very different from those of other animals, only more "heightened." Aquinas's dualistic view of men and animals, all of whom combined physical bodies with ethereal souls, had a major impact on the writings of René Descartes in the seventeenth century, who denied such dualism for other animals. He stripped the soul from nonhuman animals and left it in the sole possession of us. Only humans had a thinking substance—a ghost in the machine. All other animals were automatons merely sleepwalking through life, aware of nothing, thinking nothing. This view dominated until the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin and Georges Romanes enthusiastically embraced the belief that nonhuman animals were indeed capable of both rational thought and emotional life, even if not as lofty as our own. Yet this aspect of Darwin's thinking was harshly dismissed by the school of behaviorism beginning in the 1920s, which effectively catapulted nonhuman animals back to Aristotle's exile from the club of rationality. At best, the question of animals' minds was considered beyond the pale of science because, behaviorists said, thoughts and feelings in animals were private phenomena and therefore inaccessible to objective measurement, so it was foolish to waste time trying to access them.

  The cognitive revolution of recent decades, pioneered largely by Donald Griffin, has brought forward a new perspective on animal minds, one with which Darwin and Romanes would have been comfortable. We now recognize that Homo sapiens ("wise man" or "knowing man" or "thinking man") shares the world with other creatures that think too. By the end of the course, my students come to see that the initial question, Do animals think?, is the wrong question. It should be, How do animals think? Animals are capable of far greater richness of behaviors than was once imagined; they were simply assumed to be incapable of thinking, to lack minds of a kind that resembled ours in any way. If you live with a dog or a cat or if you ride horses, you may be quick to say, "I already knew they could think!" But the path that I trace with my students requires rigorous science rather than affectionate anecdotes. And at the end of my course, I leave science behind and turn to poetry.

  Two fine thinkers have had important influences on my work, and I feel a visceral resonance with their ideas. One is the British anthropologist and social scientist Gregory Bateson, whose phrase pattern which connects speaks eloquently of our connectedness with nature and other species. The second is Loren Eiseley, American anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer, whose prose matches or even exceeds the luminosity of his thoughts. It is to Eiseley that I turn in the final class of the course, first with his poem "Magic."1 Eiseley received thirty-six honorary degrees during his varied career, making him the most honored member of the University of Pennsylvania since Benjamin Franklin. He was devoted to bringing science to life for the general public.

  In "Magic," Eiseley described how he became enchanted by a particularly vibrant male red cardinal, one that liked "practicing vocal magic" as he flew back and forth by the windows of Eiseley's house. Eiseley described the morning ritual of opening the kitchen window, placing seed on the sill, closing the window, and waiting for that red male, along with his family, to come to feed. Tentatively at first, the birds soon came to demand the morning offering, expressing impatience if Eiseley was late or forgot, which he rarely did. Eiseley felt affection for the entire family, but it was that first red bird that found its way into his soul as the two individuals—bird and human—forged a special relationship. He thought of the bird as a "sorcerer," and he was its "apprentice." This was not the role of the brash young sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's poem, written in 1797, who, tired of the mundane chore of cleaning his master's workshop, tried to enlist his yet-to-be-tamed magical powers, to disastrous effect. Instead, in Eiseley's eyes, being a sorcerer's apprentice meant he was in a position to learn some of the magic the sorcerer wielded. Alas, before many weeks passed, the sorcerer apparently met with an accident, and its nest was thereafter deserted.

  Two lines in the poem have special meaning for me, as they speak to my own experience:

  I love forms beyond my own

  and regret the borders between us.

  I, too, have developed rituals of the sort Eiseley describes in "Magic," feeding the cardinals and imperious blue jays in my garden in Connecticut. But it is the antics of the crows that draw me. If I hadn't found my way to studying dolphins, I think I would now be working with crows. "I love forms beyond my own": Ever since I was a young girl I've felt an extraordinarily urgent, and to me entirely natural, connection with animals. My pets, and the waifs and strays that I was constantly rescuing, elicited compassion in me as instinctive as the urge to climb trees and other tomboyish antics of childhood. And I really felt I could communicate with my dog and with other creatures, as if I could wield the magic of King Solomon's ring. Show me a kid who, given the right environment, doesn't feel that way, who doesn't know in her being that she and the creatures of the world of nature are one. It is, in the purest and most innocent sense, the experience of a strong connection, a pattern that connects and a deep sense of caring—I can only describe it as unconditional love. Too bad that as we grow older and become immersed in the trappings of civilization, most of us are oblivious to its gradual disappearance.

  The German-born American social scientist and philosopher Erich Fromm coined a word for this powerful connection with nature: biophilia, a love of life and living systems. In a book with that single word as its title, the evolutionary biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson argued that biophilia is encoded in our genes, the product of evolutionary interdependence in our Paleolithic ancestors. "[W]e are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms," he wrote. "They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit."2

  For many of us in technologically advanced societies, including many environmentalists, the reductionist ethos of science that breaks nature into its component parts and doesn't see the whole, coupled with our innate natural bias sometimes called speciesism, leads us to view nonhuman creatures as inferior to Homo sapiens, beings to be judged by their economic usefulness to us, with no intrinsic value of their own. The reality of interdependence among all of Earth's organisms has little place among the essentially mechanistic mainstream thinking of today.

  For most of us, then, biophilia, part of the fabric of what it is to be human, is glimpsed only occasionally, when you stop in your tracks to gaze at a glorious natural panorama, or when you take time to walk in the woods, looking, listening, smelling nature. Or when you gaze into your pet's eyes and recognize a returned gaze. I feel extraordinarily privileged to have been able to enter the world of dolphins so intimately over the years, in my work with them in aquariums, during rescues, and in their natural habitat, which reinforces my sense of a unity in biology through the patterns that connect that I see every day. It keeps me connected to that kid in me. And in this I resonate with another line in Eiseley's "Magic":

  How does a man say to his fellows

  he has been enchanted

  by a bird?

  And how does a woman say to her colleagues, and to the world, that she has been enchanted by a dolphin? Just as Eiseley allowed himself to be taught the magic of his little avian sorcerer, not only have I been enchanted by Circe and her successors, I have been taught by them, taught to see their world through different eyes. In his book King Solomon's Ring, Konrad Lorenz spoke of the supposed magic of the seal ring as a met
aphor for enhanced powers of observation of animals' behaviors and modes of communication. Those of us who study animal communication are effectively in search of King Solomon's ring, in search of keener ways of observing and understanding them. That is what Circe and her successors have taught me.

  ***

  Consider the stories of dolphins supporting injured or aging fellow dolphins, preventing them from sinking and drowning, or approaching sailors and others in trouble at sea, warding off sharks or guiding distressed people to shore and to safety. If these acts were carried out by people toward other people, or toward animals in need of help, we would describe them as showing empathy and compassion, an expression of felt care for another individual. The question is, when dolphins behave in these ways, do these actions also come from empathy, compassion, and care? In other words, do they know what they are doing, or are they mindlessly following a primal drive?

  These are difficult questions; it is hard to know what is in the mind of an individual with whom you are not able to converse. But as Circe showed with Delphi, not every mother has an unerring instinct or understanding to push her poor flailing calf to the surface. And Circe wasn't the only mother I saw who apparently had no push-the-flailing-baby-to-the-surface instinct. There are enough such observations that I believe the primal-drive argument fails. Which leaves us with a different question: How do dolphins think under these circumstances? We have ventured along this path before, of course. But here I want to use the question to explore some of the resistance to the idea of animal thinking.