CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

breathe. Before tbe remaining three could commit suicide, I decided to let them go at sea.

They were released in a tidal boat basin connected by a narrow channel to the sea. The oldest of the three we guessed to be about forty years old; the other two were very young--three to five years old. Before the old one would allow the two younger ones to go to sea he cruised them aroumd the boat basin and kept tbem down in the water. They kept trying to jump up to look into the boat.s and to respond to humans waving at them. He knew that this would lead to their deaths at sea. Large numbers of people carry guns in their boats and shoot at dolphins that insist on showing themselves. This task took the older dolphin about three hours. When he finally achieved his aim of keeping them down, they all left through the channel to the sea and that was the last we saw of them.

We hid ourselves behind a wall so that they did not see us or they would have come back and stayed around. We had decided to make it a clean break and so hid ourselves in order to watch what happened.

The original projects in our laboratory had been set up on the basic premise that, until we demonstrated scientifically the excellent quality and size of the dolphin brain in detail to the scientific community, we had no basis for others joining us in our belief that they are highly developed beings. They are comparable if not superior to humans in strange and alien ways. I had agreed with the neuroanatomists to sacrifice three dolphins at tbe bcginning of the project so that they would have sufiicient anatomical material of first=class quality for this brain anatomy demonstration. Even at the time I had doubts about the ethical correctness of allowmg this kind of work to be done. However, I approved of it in the sense of generating scientific data and hence propaganda for the dolphins to be accepted

<----BACK -- NEXT ---->