We know that dolphins are really smart

In her article in the Science section of today's New York Times ("Studying the Big-Brained Dolphin"), Claudia Dreyfus interviews psychologist Diana Reiss.

Q. We know that dolphins are highly trainable. But how smart are they, really?
    A. Let me tell you a story. One of the first dolphins I ever worked with was Circe. I’d bring her a fish when I wanted her to do certain things. If she didn’t do them, I did a “time-out” where I turned my back and walked away. Well, there was a certain type of fish that Circe loathed because it had a spiny tail. So I accommodated her by cutting the spines off of the tail. One day, I forgot to do that. Circe spit it out, swam to the other side of the pool and placed herself into a vertical position that mimicked my time-out. I wanted to test this. I gave her untrimmed fish on four different days. Whenever I gave her fish with spiny tails, she gave me a time-out. What that suggested was that she saw time out as a correction and used it back on me. Well, that’s how we learn to communicate.

The article reports that Dr. Reiss advised the producers of the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, which I reviewed on June 16, recommending it as:

must-see for its exposure of the atrocity of Japan's annual deliberate slaughter of thousands of dolphins.

Dreyfus asks Reiss:

Q. How did you get involved with [The Cove]?
    A. I had learned about this fishing village in Japan, Taiji, where dolphins are herded into a small inlet and brutally slaughtered. These animals were being eviscerated and just left there to slowly die, flailing about in the sun. Well, these are the same type of dolphins I work with. I know how sensitive they are, how much pain they can feel, how a mere scratch bothers them.
    Few scientists were speaking out about this. So I got biologists and aquarium professionals together and we started Act for Dolphins. We went to the Japanese Embassy in D. C. to bring them scientific information about the animals. Their attitude basically was, “anything we do in our waters is our business.” I also began working with Louie Psihoyos, the film director, and that was the beginning of making the The Cove. It’s been shown in Japan, but that hasn’t stopped the dolphin drive.

Q. How do some of your fellow scientists feel about your activism?
    A. It used to be that you weren’t supposed to do both. But when I went to a marine-mammal conference a couple of years ago, I brought a petition against the dolphin roundup in Japan. Three hundred scientists instantly signed.
    My feeling is if we can’t stop 34 fishermen from treating these animals so miserably, then what hope is there for fixing anything in this world?

Even if the Japanese businessmen are stopped, there's so much else our hearts cry "stop" to, including acts by our own businessmen.
    But maybe it's like the starfish that the beachcomber threw back into the ocean. A passer-by said, "What difference does it make? There are so many starfish you can't save from dying in the sun."
    The beachcomber replied, "It makes a lot of difference to that one."

The Cove, in its own right

Since watching this year's Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, I've meant to write it up and recommend it as must-see for its exposure of the atrocity of Japan's annual deliberate slaughter of thousands of dolphins, whose extremely highly mercury-contaminated flesh is sold to unsuspecting consumers.
    The reason for the high level of mercury contamination is that dolphins eat at a very high level on the oceanic food chain, and humans have put a lot of mercury into the oceans. Very few people in Japan know what's happening in the hidden cove. The men engaged in the enterprise, though they claim to think it's okay, have gone to great lengths to try to keep observers (especially observers with cameras) out of the area. The film crew's accomplishment in producing The Cove is astonishing. The story is riveting. The Cove was directed by Louie Psihoyos, and features Ric O'Barry, who trained the dolphins in the TV series, Flipper, and rues the outcome.
    But the film shocked me, and I'm still shocked, apparently to the point (until last Saturday) of not being able to say anything, or knowing what to say. The stupid, wanton destruction of even one (let alone thousands annually) of nature's intelligent creatures....

I'm still morally stunned, by The Cove more than by the films about World War II that I mentioned on Saturday. I've become desensitized to what happens in a war, but the intentional slaughter of friendly, well-loved dolphins for monetary gain is beyond me.
    The wanton destruction of even one (let alone thousands and millions and tens of millions) of nature's intelligent creatures (from dolphins and other intelligent non-human creatures to other humans) is brutal because the perpetrators are (at least in theory) capable of morality.
    That is, though "brute" originally referred to a beast, or non-human, it has come to refer to a savage or "inhuman" human, which is a nice paradox, come to think of it. Humans are (in theory) capable of being human, but we're so often [morally] inhuman.
    As for the original, non-human brutes, can we fault them for devouring the animals lower than they on the food chain? I don't think so. The food chain (below the human level) is amoral and therefore not itself [morally] brutal, but if "God" created it, then isn't God Himself brutal—that is, a brute? Absent God, the brutes of nature are the human ones who exercise their inhumanity.