their rations, so understandably few opt for inordinate displays
of privacy when smelt, however diminutive, are on o=er). I take
my paper tray of little fish and join the line.
Opportunities to interact with Tursiops truncatus drive a
healthy minor industry in the U.S. and abroad. Touch-and-feed
attractions like this one are ubiquitous at water-themed amusement parks around the world, and programs in Mexico, the
British Virgin Islands, and elsewhere cater to tourists seeking
fully immersed contact with these animals. The most elaborate
of such enterprises feature “dolphin assisted therapy,” which offers patient-customers the opportunity for extended aquatic in-timacies that promoters insist can work wonders with autistic
children, the withdrawn, those su=ering from chronic pain— a
whole roster of ailments like those that once drove pilgrims to
the baths at Lourdes.
Sea World itself o=ers occasions for such miracles. One of the
park’s employees tells me the story of an old man in a local nurs-
ing home who had been mute and vegetative before a commu-
nity service agency brought him into the park’s Dolphin
Interaction program, whereupon, after several sessions, he re-
portedly regained his vitality, his will to live, and finally even his
speech. Anecdotes like this concerning the salvific powers of Tur-
siops abound in the subculture of committed dolphin lovers,
many of whom believe that the animals use their sonar (bottle-
nose dolphins possess powerful abilities to echolocate underwa-
ter, scanning their environment by means of sound) to reach
inside the human body for diagnostic or palliative pur-
poses—and perhaps also, at times, to reach inside the human
mind. As one dolphin handler put it to me, looking up from a
pen of captive Tursiops, “Plenty of folks out there think these
creatures are closer to God.”
Though it is by no means obvious, upon reflection, why one
would accord Tursiops this privilege. Despite the widespread
sense of the benevolence of these beasts, there are reported in-
stances of wild and captive Tursiops injuring and even killing
swimmers. Males are, episodically, libidinous in the extreme, and
in some of these cases it has been alleged that the aggressive ani-
mals had mating in mind. As for their vaunted intelligence, it’s
an i=y thing: for instance, they have not proven especially savvy
about escaping from fishing nets at sea; and though they can
