Dolphin Update

Here we go again. Now it’s being reported that a dolphin has actually rescued a pair of pygmy sperm whales, a mother and calf, on the coast of New Zealand. If you haven’t heard about this yet, the official PR spin is available here(AP), and here(Reuters).

My first reaction to this, as I’m sure was yours, was: what a shoddy piece of reporting. In fact, it’s so bad it can’t be anything but yet another prefab puff piece courtesy of the worldwide dolphin PR spin machine.

First of all, they assume these whales wanted to leave the beach. We can’t communicate with them though, because apparently they’re not as smart as the goody goody dolphins, so we don’t know for sure. The experts like to say whale beachings are accidental, but no one has any proof. Maybe they were on the run. Maybe they were playing hide and seek, and thanks to human busybodies and this fucking dolphin, now they’re gonna be It. It has also been suggested that human beings are somehow responsible for beachings around the world because our cell phone signals interfere with whale echolocation. Maybe that’s true. Maybe not. Maybe it’s the dolphins screwing with whale echolocation, a dolphin practical joke, like when someone’s about to sit down and you pull the chair out from under them. Who knows? We may never know because there is currently no research being done on this phenomenon.

Second, while it appears this dolphin, Moko’s her name, did in fact lead these two whales to and through a channel out to sea, there is absolutely no confirmation as to what exactly happened once they got there. As far as I can tell, the reporters didn’t even try to follow them. If a mother and child were stranded on the side of the road, and a stranger appeared and led them away somewhere, never to be seen or heard from again, would we consider that a rescue? Or the first five minutes of “Without A Trace”? I’m not saying this dolphin whacked them, but you never know. Maybe Moko had a prearranged deal with a hungry tiger shark who was laying in wait to ambush them once they were “out to sea.” We just assume these clever bastards are benevolent.

Actually, it goes way beyond that. You may have noticed the quote from one expert claiming dolphins have “a great capacity for altruistic activities.” How you say this with a straight face, I don’t know. But these are the kind of delusional people we’re dealing with.

Here are more quotes designed to convince you that dolphins superior:

Moko, who had been visiting the beach at Mahia on and off over the summer… Like she’s a fucking tourist on holiday.

”…it's the first time I've heard of an inter-species refloating technique.” Now they have fucking techniques. Techniques that we humans are too stupid to invent ourselves.

"The dolphin managed in a couple of minutes what we had failed to do in an hour and a half." Let us prostrate ourselves and bow. Let us kneel before the mighty dolphin.

Being a keen observer of dolphin chicanery, I suspect what was really happening here was Moko saw these two whales as a threat to her beloved limelight, and she got them the hell away from there so she could have all the attention for herself. Fucking dolphins.