The many drawbacks of being loved by a truly unattractive species

ANOTHER summer gone by without me swimming with dolphins. All I can ever boast is swimming with jellyfish.

It was an unplanned experiment which accidentally ascertained that wasps and jellyfish are both species given to display in much the same way as Cheryl Cole and they hate everything else in the world. Being on the physical receiving end of that hatred makes being pursued by Twitter trolls seem like a picnic.

I’ve been on the sea in a boat at the same time as dolphins were swimming close by. None of them did Flipper’s walking backwards trick, but apparently dolphins in the wild don’t do that crowd-pleasing stuff. The backward walk is the prerogative of the happy slave. In common with other slave-owners, humans tend to interpret learned obsequiousness, whether it take the form of minstrel songs in the Deep South or bribe-bought tricks on the part of cute mammals as natural, inborn demonstrations of their happiness with their respective lot: they love us and want to show it at the drop of — well, at the drop of a trainer’s signal.

Being loved by an unattractive species has its drawbacks. Nobody envies the human whose scent or clothing attracts wasps. Similarly, while owners of bulldogs and rottweilers will defend to the death the looks of their pets, the reaction of others veers between sympathy and amusement.

Human beings apply an arbitrary pecking order to every species, including their own, irrespective of whether or not it can peck. Swans and robins win the avian contest, with ravens and crows coming in at the end.

Never mind that a swan would break your arm if you looked crooked at it, or that robins are the most aggressively territorial birds known. Never mind that ravens and crows are probably the cleverest birds around and have been found making their own tools. It’s not IQ that brings a bird to the top of human preference lists. It’s clothing. Those little red waistcoats have put robins on the front of Christmas cards (with apologies for mentioning those things when it’s only the second day of September) and Hans Christian Anderson pointed out a wee while back that until a swan gets its debs dress, nobody pays it a blind bit of attention.

It’s all about looks. Spaniels and labradors and golden retrievers are top of the class when it comes to looks. They may be thick as planks, but that doesn’t matter.

It’s the same with the labrador of the sea, the dolphin. It’s not heavy-handed and over-dressed like those Orca whales, or speedy and many-toothedly vicious, like a shark. The bottle-nose variety have a permanent smile on their faces. Small wonder that Flipper starred in his own show and still appears, standing up and reversing in the water while squeaking with delight, in re-runs.

Dolphins win the mammal beauty contest by a nautical mile, although of course, none of us admit that they win the Miss Underwater World contest on looks alone. Instead, we refer to their great intelligence and their altruism. Not only are dolphins in the maritime Mensa club, but they’ve got a great memory, too. A human, meeting another human at a party, doesn’t expect to be able to name the other human 20 years later, but dolphins were recently proven to be able to do the equivalent. Having allocated a particular whistle to another dolphin, they were heard to greet that dolphin by the same whistle after a 20-year interval: “Deirdre, great to see you looking not a day older...”

Dolphins can be trained in a way cats cannot. The Institute of Marine Mammal studies in Mississippi trains all the dolphins with which they work to hold on to any litter that falls into their pool until a trainer arrives, at which point they can trade the litter for a fish reward, thereby keeping their pool clean.

One of the dolphins there, named Kelly, worked out a way to work the system. When a bit of paper fell into the pool, Kelly would grab it and stash it under a rock in the pool. When the trainer appeared, Kelly would head for the rock, tear off a bit of the paper and present it for a quid pro quo fish. A little later, she’d tear off another bit and get another fish. Kelly had worked out that the going rate for a piece of paper was a fish, and that the humans involved in this paper/fish swap didn’t seem to be pushed whether they got a small piece or a big piece. So she trained them to give her as many as four fish by dividing up the paper.

But that was only the beginning. One day a seagull flew into her pool. She grabbed it and handed it over when the trainers arrived. They, in turn, rewarded her with lots of fish. Which brought out the entrepreneur in Kelly. At her next official feeding time, she saved her last fish and secreted it beneath the same rock under which she had been hiding paper.

As soon as the trainers had disappeared from view, she took the fish out and trailed it across the surface of the pool to attract more seagulls, one of which she captured and presented to the trainers. Kelly had done the maths.

One fish could get her half a dozen fish, if the single fish were parlayed into a gull. This lucrative strategy was captured on CCTV, and, in due course was passed on by Kelly to her offspring.

While the smartness of Kelly is tinged with sadness because it has been dedicated to effectively bribing her jailers for more food, the fact is that dolphins in the wild show equal smarts. Bottlenose dolphins off the west of Australia put sponges over their snouts when they go to forage for food, using the sponges to protect them against the hard spines of stonefish and stingrays. In other parts of the world, dolphins do the same with seaweed, bringing it along on hunting expeditions to disguise themselves. They have even been seen — like the crows — to create tools. In the case of the dolphins, the tool is “created” by killing a spiny scorpion fish in order to employ it to poke eels out of narrow crevices.

Not only are dolphins clever, they’re kind. Anecdotal examples abound of dolphins rescuing other dolphins and banding together to keep a sick or injured dolphin afloat and moving to keep it oxygenated. Other anecdotes establish their altruistic concern for humans of various ages. As a result of all of this, they are pretty consistently top of the mammal pops. This has been good for dolphins in only one case I can think of. That was when big fishing companies were forced to change their nets because dolphin were getting caught in the same nets as cod.

Most of the time, we kill them (by “accident” of course) capture them, enslave them, and exploit them. Now, we’ve moved up to pouring alcohol in their blowholes and throwing burning cigarettes at them. They shouldn’t associate with evil species like humans.