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Cowboys have horses, shepherds have dogs, and
Japanese fishermen have those weird cormorant things, so it was only
natural that as innerspace was colonised the pioneers would need
their own animal mascots. Since dogs tend to drown and clams were a
bit of a non-starter, the job fell on the dolphins.
Dolphins had long been known to be relatively
intelligent animals, probably somewhere between that of a dog and a
chimpanzee, and they were great mimics and quick learners. In
fact, by the 1960s the height of enthusiasm for colonising the sea was
matched by the opinion of some scientists and many popular science writers
that dolphins were at least as intelligent as man and that it was only a matter
of time before we, or they, learned the other's language. In
fact, it got to the point where the likes of John Lilly took huge
leaps of logic and a good many mind-altering drugs before becoming
convinced that dolphins were our intellectual and moral superiors
enjoying a transcendental existence that mere land-dwelling mortals
can only enjoy in an illegal state of mind.
 Be
that as it may, the US Navy took a keen interest in training dolphins
as part of its undersea habitat programme with the cetaceans being
schooled to help the aquanauts in their work. Forty years on,
the Americans have had a good deal of success in training not
only dolphins, but also sea lions for such tasks as detecting mines,
retrieving torpedoes, and intercepting enemy divers.
They have yet, however, to encounter a dolphin keen to start up a
conversation about Marcel Proust. |
