Featured Image Credit: BBC
Topics: Animals, News, World News
Gerrard Kaonga
A dolphin who 'fell in love' with his trainer during NASA-funded experiment went on to have a tragic story.
Despite having some of the brightest minds around, there really was no way NASA scientists could have predicted how things would have panned out when they funded a study in the Caribbean.
In the 1960s, Margaret Howe Lovatt was desperate to follow her passion of working with animals.
She was able to get the ball rolling despite her lack of scientific experience, and started working with American neuroscientist John Lilly who had gotten funding to nurture a closer relationship between humans and dolphins.
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During her time in the lab, Lovatt spent three months living with one particular dolphin, called Peter, as she attempted to teach the mammal to speak English.
Lilly built a sort of dolphin house flooded with water known as the ‘Dolphinarium’ where Lovatt would talk around the Peter, hoping he would pick up the language.
‘Sexual urges’ from Peter ended up hampering the progress of the experiment which resulted in Lovatt initially opting to allow the male dolphin time with the two other females.
However, eventually this proved too long and disruptive so she decided to help him along ‘manually’ instead.
Speaking about how she... gave him a hand, Lovatt said: “I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn’t rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch - just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that’s how it seemed to work out. It wasn’t private. People could observe it.”
This eventually contributed to the experiment losing its funding, as bad publicity that came after it featured in a Hustler magazine ultimately reflected poorly on the research.
With the funding for their experiments cut, the fate of the dolphins came into question.
Speaking in a BBC documentary, The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, Lovatt said she couldn’t keep Peter any longer and her job transitioned to decommissioning the lab.
The dolphins were then to be transported to Lilly’s other lab, in a disused bank building in Miami.
In this lab, the dolphins were held in smaller tanks and received little to no sunlight, something Lovatt believed negatively impacted Peter.
A few weeks after the move, Lovatt received some heartbreaking news.
She told The Guardian in 2014: “I got that phone call from John Lilly. John called me himself to tell me Peter had committed suicide.”
Ric O’Barry, of the Dolphin Project (an organization that aims to stop dolphin slaughter and exploitation around the world), explained how exactly a dolphin can intentionally kill itself.
He said: “Dolphins are not automatic air-breathers like we are.
“Every breath is a conscious effort. If life becomes too unbearable, the dolphins just take a breath and they sink to the bottom. They don’t take the next breath.”
Lovatt also reflected on hearing the news and said she ‘wasn’t terribly unhappy’ about the separation.
However, she continued: “I was more unhappy about him being in those conditions [at the Miami lab] than not being at all. Nobody was going to bother Peter, he wasn’t going to hurt, he wasn’t going to be unhappy, he was just gone. And that was OK. Odd, but that’s how it was.”