Scientists: Treat Dolphins Like People
Dolphins are so smart, it’s morally criminal to keep them locked up in tanks. In fact, we should be treating them as “non-human persons”, say scientists who have been studying the animals’ intelligence and behavior.
The researchers say that these sea mammals are brighter than chimpanzees, with many key brain features that are associated with high intelligence.
From The Times Online:
“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.
“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.
In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.
In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.
Considering that chimps are as smart as three-year-old children, rating the intelligence of dolphins as higher than that is significant. If you’ve ever been around a precocious toddler, with all of their questions and observations, you know just how smart that really is.
Far too many people have taken the whole “men have dominion over the earth” thing way too far, and it’s time that we start realizing that humans aren’t the only creatures on the planet that matter, no matter what their intelligence level is.
But let’s face it – once the dolphins figure out how to walk on land, we’re in trouble.
Link Times Online via Digg
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Consciousness, Green Living, Health, Science, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
