Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  Spelunking daily into the depths of grief and heartbreak is not something most people want to do. Over the years, interviewers have asked O’Barry why he chose to devote his life to dolphins in such a single-minded way, setting them firmly on the front burner and everything else, including his family, on the back. When you get to know him, however, his motivation becomes obvious—he has no choice. O’Barry understands dolphins and what they represent: “They’re a reference point in our relationship with nature. The cove opens to a bay, the bay opens to the sea, life goes on.” As in a holograph, what happens in one little corner of Japan contains the blueprint of the whole. Domination, cruelty, profiteering: what a tragedy if we let those actions define us.

  I found the dolphin and whale sushi bar in one of the mildewy tunnels at our hotel, an unassuming restaurant cloaked by a canvas curtain. The only thing that signaled its purpose was a whale on the front of the menu, swimming across a soup bowl. I poked my head in and saw that the place was full. Near the doorway, a Japanese family, cozy in their yukatas, sat at a table laden with dishes and plates and kettles, bowls of broth, and bottles of beer.

  I’d come upon the restaurant while trying to return to my room after visiting the Urashima’s most popular onsen bath, the Boki-do Cave, a volcanic pool on the windward side of the bay. The cave was blustery and wave-swept and dramatic, all things I liked, but I had left quickly. There is a list of onsen rules about three feet long, setting out many compulsory and forbidden behaviors, and though I’d been instructed about when to rinse and what never to do with soap and when you must be naked and when it is unspeakably rude to be unclothed—I’d forgotten everything, distracted because every person I met was glowering at me. I hadn’t even been sure about whether I’d stripped down in the women’s changing room or a coed resting area; both were identified only by gold Japanese characters on red velvet drapes. I took a wild guess and, judging from the looks I got, wasn’t sure it had been the right one.

  Touring around in my yukata, feet slip-slapping in my shower shoes through the maze of hallways, I opened a pagoda-shaped door and stumbled onto a banquet hall—private dinner for two hundred bathrobed guests in progress, no one overly pleased to see me gaping at the buffet’s centerpiece: a three-tiered sunburst made of tuna heads, surrounded by platters of raw tuna, and every tuna’s mouth stuffed with yet more hunks of tuna.

  It was time to leave. I was tired of looking over my shoulder for malingering yakuza, and the weather had turned so foul that the dolphin-hunting boats were confined to shore. Maxwell was driving back to Osaka tomorrow, and I was going with her.

  We had agreed to meet at four o’clock the next morning, rising in the dark so I could catch a noon flight from Osaka back to New York City. When I rolled my luggage across the lobby in the predawn, the cavernous hotel seemed lonely without the crowds rivering through it. Outside, the sky was a black hole, rainy, moonless, and illuminated only by the wet glare of dock lights. While I waited for Maxwell, I texted O’Barry to say good-bye. Last night he had taken the monitors out for a vegan Chinese dinner and I had missed the chance to do it in person. “Good luck at the cove,” I wrote. “I hope the bad weather holds up.” I asked if I could stay in touch, maybe catch up with him at another stop on his unending itinerary. I wasn’t surprised when he replied immediately. O’Barry rarely slept while he was here; that kind of peace eluded him. He wasn’t sure where he was headed after Taiji, he texted, but he would let me know. His travels might take him to the Philippines or back to Indonesia or hopefully to Denmark, where his wife, Helene, and his eight-year-old daughter, Mai Li, lived. He hadn’t seen them in weeks. There was a dolphin protest in Ontario, and a baby dolphin at loose ends in Spain, and one particularly tough trip that he would need to make soon, to the epicenter of dolphin turmoil. If I didn’t mind a level of hazard and confrontation that would make Taiji look restful, I was welcome to join him, O’Barry wrote. “I still have a lot of unfinished work in the Solomon Islands.”

  It was a long straight shot from Vegas to Utah, driving from the neon blitz of the Strip across miles of blast-furnace desert, studded with brush and aching for water, to Mesquite, where the landscape turned as red as Mars. I stopped there for the night at a motor hotel perched above the town. From my room I could see miles of canyonlands, red rock mesas banded with mauve and rust and pink glowing under a fat moon. Early the next morning I drove on, leaving Utah for a second or two to clip Arizona’s northwest corner, rolling past creepy Colorado City, where members of a polygamous sect of Fundamentalist Mormons lived with their child brides and fifty-eight-member families in oversize boxy houses. The road was flat and featureless and invited speeding.

  Back into Utah again, just past the state border, I turned east toward my destination: Kanab, population 4,410. That number had recently increased by one. An eminent neuroscientist, Lori Marino, had packed up her lab at Emory University in Atlanta, said good-bye to her collection of dolphin brains, and moved here. It wasn’t Kanab itself that had drawn Marino, but one particular piece of it, Angel Canyon, where the Best Friends Animal Society runs the country’s largest no-kill sanctuary, housing some two thousand dogs, cats, horses, birds, rabbits, and other lucky creatures. On Best Friends’ 20,700-acre grounds, Marino’s neighbors would be one-eyed bunnies and rehabilitated eagles and abandoned piglets and neurotic donkeys and battalions of kittens and some of Michael Vick’s pit bulls, a stellar, crazy-quilt community of animals. Which was exactly what she wanted.

  I had become interested in Marino after reading her name constantly in relation to dolphins. She specialized in biopsychology, the biological basis of behavior, and neuroanatomy, the study of the brain’s architecture, but instead of focusing her attention on humans, Marino had chosen to study cetaceans. She was one of only a few dolphin brain experts in the world. When dolphins appeared in the media she was often quoted, and what she had to say was always engaging. In one interview I’d read, she was asked: If dolphins had stayed on land, would they now be the dominant intelligence on Earth? I suspected Marino did think that, but she answered in a nuanced way. “While they don’t build rockets, their level of sociality is so sophisticated I don’t think they have anything to learn from us,” she replied. “The fact that they have co-habited the ocean and not destroyed themselves really speaks to the fact that they have figured out a way to do this in a way we haven’t.”

  Marino’s work was very prominent in the scientific literature: she had authored more than a hundred papers in her field. “The dolphin brain represents a different neurological scheme for intelligence,” she said, explaining her research. “And it’s a very complex intelligence.” In one massive study, she had collected 210 dolphin skulls from across the eons and run them through CT scanners to determine how the animals’ brains had evolved. Marino and her colleagues reconstructed 3-D models of dolphin brains from as far back as 47 million years ago, when they were relatively small and unspectacular, and charted them up to their current, turbocharged state.

  Curiously, as the dolphins’ brains expanded dramatically in size, their bodies shrank, their teeth became smaller, and they developed high-frequency hearing. This downsizing contrasts with our own far more recent developments—as early human brains grew, during our own surge between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, our bodies did not significantly change scale. Our sensory abilities stayed more or less the same. We didn’t suddenly turn into dwarves or sprout wings or learn to see through our noses. It was business as usual for us, except with more horsepower, but the dolphins have shape-shifted in bold ways. On several occasions during their 95-million-year existence they have morphed into entirely different creatures, adapting to life both on land and in the ocean, appearing at various points as solo predators with impressive fangs, ace communicators packing powerful sonar, social networkers juggling complex relationships. Their bodies have gone through constant flux. But what happened during the dolphins’ history, Marino wondered, for their gray matter to undergo such a radical gr
owth spurt? It was an evolutionary puzzle. I wanted to talk to her about this, and countless other dolphin perplexities. She had looked into the animals’ heads, literally.

  Marino had also investigated more conceptual aspects of the dolphin mind. In 2000, she and another scientist, Diana Reiss, conducted one of the most acclaimed dolphin experiments of all time. Its premise was deceptively simple: a test to see if a bottlenose could recognize himself in a mirror. Most animals couldn’t. They ignored the mirror or treated it as if it were another animal, approaching it tentatively or aggressively. To make the test more definitive, the subjects’ bodies were marked in a conspicuous spot. For instance, if a chimp who was daubed with a pink stripe down his cheek leaned in to touch his mark and examine it in the mirror, he was said to have “passed” the test. He understood that the chimp with the odd tattoo was himself.

  When Marino and Reiss first proposed to try this with dolphins, only humans and our fellow great apes—chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas—had demonstrated self-awareness. So it was front-page science news when Marino and Reiss’s two bottlenoses, Presley and Tab, became the first non-primates to do this, mugging in front of the mirror, craning their bodies around, and flipping upside down to examine their marks. (Since then, elephants and magpies have also passed the test.)

  Though it might seem like no big deal, to conceive of your own identity is a rare cognitive feat. The idea of a self is a pretty far-out abstraction, and to get that I am me and you are you and that we both have autonomy but there’s also a relationship between us—this capacity was long considered unique to our own two-legged, opposable-thumbed species. It’s not an ability that can be taken for granted: children don’t begin to develop self-awareness until they’re nearly two years old, along with feelings like sympathy and empathy. To know that dolphins operate in the same realms of consciousness we do raises a raft of fascinating questions about their interior lives and, in turn, the ethics of how we treat them. What Reiss and Marino accomplished, really, was to prove what John Lilly had only been able to guess: that the dolphin in the tank is not a what but a who.

  In the aftermath of the mirror test, Marino did something unexpected: she publicly vowed never to conduct research on captive dolphins again. Most scientists tack in the opposite direction, leaning away from their feelings in an attempt to focus on the data; for Marino, it was the data themselves that prompted her to take a stand. Knowing how conscious the dolphins were of their own situations, she could no longer justify keeping them in tanks, away from their pods and their natural lives. These days she refers to herself as a scientist-advocate, using everything she’s learned about dolphins to argue for their well-being.

  Mixing hard-nosed science with heartfelt activism is a delicate balancing act, one that might trip up the career of a lesser scientist, but Marino’s credentials make it impossible for anyone to dismiss her. For instance, if you are someone who would like to tell the public, as SeaWorld does on its Web site, that dolphins’ high intelligence is “untested and disputed,” Marino would beg to differ with you. Then, she would like to point you toward several dozen peer-reviewed studies that prove you wrong. Testifying in Congress in 2010, she demonstrated that marine parks violate the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, which requires facilities displaying dolphins to also provide accurate educational materials. Marino examined the parks’ offerings line by line and pointed out multiple errors, misrepresentations, and even lies, shredding them to bits by citing the actual science.

  It wasn’t only dolphins Marino wanted to stick up for. By moving to Angel Canyon she was signaling a next phase in her career, one in which she would use hard facts to petition for all animals. She wasn’t alone. Researchers around the globe are coming to the same conclusion—we are not the only beings who matter—and new ideas are stirring about how the startling depth and breadth of other creatures morally obliges us to act humanely toward them. Now we have seen that elephants cry when they’re sad, and some dogs have a greater vocabulary uptake than toddlers, and sheep can pick faces out of a crowd. We’ve learned that chickens show empathy and pigs express optimism. Scrub jays plan for the future. Hippos can be vindictive. Pigeons are excellent at math. Thanks to YouTube, viral video clips of animals doing amazing stuff are a regular feature in our lives, cats rescuing their owners and rats cuddling stuffed toys and bonobos driving golf carts. But what will we do with this information?

  In 2012, a group of neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge drafted “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness,” which recognized the awesome abilities of nonhumans, down to the lowly earthworm (makes judgments, acts with discernment, strategizes). “The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way we are, and it’s no longer something we can ignore,” one observer wrote of the proceedings.

  Marino wanted to do more than endorse this declaration; she wanted to act on it. Throughout her career she had watched fellow scientists perform horrific animal experiments, tinkering with their subjects in Frankensteinian ways and considering it standard practice. During her PhD, she had turned down a full scholarship at Princeton because she couldn’t bear to vivisect cats. As a student, Marino’s work with lab rats had given her nightmares; years spent studying brains taught her beyond all doubt that there are no dumb beasts. Despite the seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher René Descartes’s proclamation that animals lack a soul—that they are no more than sentient machines—we are now aware of a far more textured reality: that other brains have bloomed along with ours, forging many divergent paths to intelligence, none of which we fully understand. Dolphins, everyone agrees, are Exhibit A.

  Kanab is a tiny town on the edge of a vast wilderness, with the Grand Canyon only three hours up the road. It has a folksy feel. I was relieved to be out in fresh and appealing scenery, in a place where people were more bent on rock climbing than dolphin killing. Back in New York I’d noticed that Taiji was stuck to me like tar. It made me feel out of sorts, even nauseous sometimes. The nerve-racking clamor of Manhattan—the pounding jackhammers and shrieking car alarms and ceaseless traffic, the sirens, street cleaners, clanging noises and small explosions emanating from trucks—seemed to rattle me more than ever. There were too many crowds and too much cement and not enough trees. Sleep was elusive, punctuated by dark dreams. One afternoon on Forty-second Street a heavily pierced girl elbowed past me on the sidewalk wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words FUCK EVERYBODY. I understood how she felt.

  I couldn’t get the dolphin hunt out of my head, especially since each day brought new bad news. Two days after I’d left, the hunters had captured a hundred pilot whales and killed every last one of them, including mothers and calves, along with a pod of thirty bottlenose dolphins. Tim Burns, monitoring the cove, had written, “I had to re-count numerous times to actually wrap my brain around such an alarming number. I’m speechless.” The next day he reported: “Dolphins giving up a fight. Fishermen ramming them with boats and motors. Ruthless.” Rumors circulated that the Taiji Fishermen’s Union had run out of freezer space and was now gathering dolphins for live export. A pod of ninety-two bottlenoses was corralled next, and the marine park selection process lasted for days. Most of the dolphins were sold, and the remainder—too old, too young, too scarred-up, or too feisty—were butchered as usual. Then a group of Risso’s dolphins was driven into the cove. None of them made it back out. “Things are bloody awful here,” O’Barry had e-mailed.

  Hitting the road has always seemed to me like a fine antidote for angst, so I had been itching to head out. It was only after driving hours into the desert that I felt myself unclenching. There is no ocean in Kanab, but there is the peacefulness that arises when nature is bigger than you are. Five miles outside town, I spotted the Best Friends sign and turned into Angel Canyon.

  Marino was waiting for me at the visitors’ center, a ranch-style building at the foot of some red rock bluffs. She is petite, with shoulder-length sandy-brown
hair and large, watchful hazel eyes. We sat outside on a deck, while beside us hummingbirds whirred around a feeder. Thunder rumbled in the distance. I told Marino that I was happy to be somewhere serene after grappling with Taiji. She nodded, looking pained.

  Marino hadn’t been to the cove, but she’d seen plenty of footage. Years before The Cove hit theaters, before the fishermen began their efforts to conduct their slaughter out of sight, filmmaker and activist Hardy Jones had captured graphic video of the hunts and distributed it widely. The brutality of the process shocked every marine researcher who watched it. Though scientists rarely agree unanimously on anything, more than three hundred of them signed a letter to the Japanese government denouncing the dolphin hunts. Marino helped organize this effort, and made her own outrage clear. As a result, she (and Emory University) had also been sued by Ocean World for speaking out against the capture of the Taiji twelve. Like O’Barry, Marino was litigated against for millions of dollars. Her case had been settled so she couldn’t discuss details, but she was clearly stung by the experience.

  If the point of the lawsuit was to stop her from expressing strong opinions, however, it had failed. She was a forceful, articulate voice against animal cruelty, wherever she encountered it. “When I started to get into the dark side of the zoo and aquarium industry,” she told me, “particularly the marine mammal captivity industry—it started with Taiji, understanding what went on there—I mean, it makes the drug or mafia underworld look like a picnic. These people are blood brokers!”