Dolphins are considered to be the smartest animals on earth, some say they are second only to humans and smarter than primates. Living in complex, mature societies, these small cetaceans share the same highly developed communication skills and high self-esteem that we humans do.
They have been the subject of many scientific or zoological studies over the past 70 years. One of the most famous and controversial studies took place in 1965, when the eccentric but celebrated neuroscientist John Lilly set up a laboratory at a beachfront home on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Dolphinarium Lab will test dolphins and their ability to learn, understand and speak English.
He was assisted by Margaret Howe, 23, who lived alone with an adult bottlenose dolphin named Peter for 10 to 12 weeks in their flooded home as part of the experiment. Margaret tries to teach Peter to talk like a mother teaches her toddler.
At the time, many dolphins didn’t see anything special. Still, their brains are large, and early researchers discovered that they can mimic human voices and appear to communicate with each other in more complex and sophisticated ways. Part of the funding for Lilly even comes from NASA, which is interested in any insights they can glean and apply to possible communications with interstellar beings.
When the experiment began, Margaret and Peter spent nearly 24 hours together as she tried to help him understand English words and compared them to the natural communication sounds made by dolphins, including whistles, grunts, clicks and squeaks. Peter is a happy dolphin who is very charming and very active. Margaret felt she was making progress, but John was not satisfied. As the weeks passed, Margaret noticed that Peter was in heat and fully grown from a juvenile dolphin. No longer interested in the course and distraught, he seeks sexual relief from Margaret.
After that, things took a turn for the worse. Still impatient with better outcomes for interspecies communication, John decides to inject Peter with LSD to stimulate his brain. John, a heavy LSD user, has researched the psychological effects and opportunities it can provide the brain. LSD had a severe effect on the dolphins, making them more aggressive and eating Margaret’s feet and legs, which were very resistant to John’s disturbance. Margaret – who just wanted Peter to focus on his English practice – decided to relieve the dolphin by manually rubbing his genitals – whenever he was overstimulated.
Peter suffered from his use of LSD and eventually killed himself by refusing to pump air from his tank. There was an uproar when John lost credibility and all his sponsors (including NASA) withdrew all their funding.
The dolphin house experiment failed to deliver on its promise to unravel the mystery of communication between species. It did, however, raise many concerns about the mental capabilities of dolphins, and the need for ethics when experimenting on animals.
