IN DEFENSE OF DOLPHINS

This powerful book challenges readers to redefine their understanding of dolphins as 'non-human persons' with ethical rights, and is based on a thorough review of the research literature as well as fifteen years of personal experience. Many readers will have read anecdotes indicating the special capacities of dolphins, but this book provides enough evidence to begin to draw philosophical and ethical conclusions about the status of dolphins. It boils down to two ultimate questions: what kind of beings are dolphins? And, what does our answer to the first question say about the ethical character of human/dolphin contact, specifically in terms of fishing practices involving the death of thousands of dolphins a year and their use in captivity as entertainers? In this context, philosophers distinguish between human as a scientific concept and person as a philosophical concept implying self-consciousness, intelligence and a measure of free will. So is a dolphin effectively a non-human person?

The chapters cover a number of key areas: the anatomy and physiology of living in the water, including a comparative analysis of the capacities of human and dolphin brains; do dolphins think and feel, and can they solve problems and understand language? What is the nature of dolphin social intelligence? When these questions are analysed and broken down, it becomes apparent that dolphins do have remarkable capacities. Anatomically, the surface of the dolphin brain is more convoluted, it has a bigger cerebral cortex than humans, a substantial associational neocortex and the structure of the limbic system is different. All this makes it the second most complicated and powerful brain on the planet.

This capacity is borne out in the experimental findings discussed in subsequent chapters. Dolphins pass the standard mirror test for self-awareness used in humans and they do not treat their reflection as if it were another dolphin. The evidence supports conclusions that dolphins are aware of themselves and others, they experience basic emotions, they engage in thinking processes and can choose their actions. These questions are explored in greater detail in the next chapter reporting on problem-solving and language capacity. Lou Herman's research shows that dolphins can follow instructions in basic artificial languages, both acoustic and gestural, and can even understand simple new sentences using the familiar components.

Having considered the experimental evidence, White returns to the philosophical implications of the findings with an eight-part definition of a person, which he uses to evaluate dolphin intelligence. Dolphins measure up on all counts, which sounds amazing until one has read through the analysis for oneself. One can argue that the notion of personhood is flawed, anthropocentric and dependent on language, but it does provide one measure that can also be applied to other species. Accordingly, White refines his own definitions, concluding that dolphins appear to be a 'who' rather than a 'what'. This naturally leads on to a consideration of interspecies ethics with highly practical implications for, in the first instance, tuna fishing practices such as purse seining, which has resulted in the deaths of 6-7 million dolphins. In spite of preventive action, dolphins are regularly chased and trapped. In addition, thousands of dolphins are killed every year in drift nets. The ethical status of our actions harming dolphins is clear. The argument relating to benefits and harms to captive dolphins is different and more complex, but some analogy to slavery can be made when considering their basic wellbeing and needs. Other issues arise in relation to their use in healing and, more controversially, for military purposes in detecting mines. Ironically, dolphins seem to treat us better than we treat them, lending weight to White's argument. Even reading this review may have modified your understanding of the ethical status of dolphins, but reading the book itself will certainly do so.