Li 1

Hongyang Li

Dr. Lynda Haas

Writing 39C

2/26/2018

Dolphin Cognition and Problem on Dolphin Hunting

Introduction

A question always being asked today is that “Do you believe animals have intelligence?” Jennifer

Vonk, a comparative psychologist said that people want to be special in the world; perhaps that is why

hearing about the cleverness of animals makes some people a little uncomfortable. However,

primatologist Frans de Waal, a leader in the field of animal cognition research, suggests it’s time we wipe

our minds of the idea that there is only one type of intelligence: “Animal cognition is more like a bush.

The corvids branch in one direction, the dolphins in another, the primates, including us, in another. You

can’t put them on a simple scale because all animals are very smart in what they need to do to survive.

In Carl Safina’s book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, he introduces the

communication of dolphins through a complicated skill in understand language which is “syntax”. Safina

defines syntax as the understanding that the order of the words will change the meaning of a sentence.

According to Herman, the captive dolphin researcher, dolphins could realize differences in the sentences

in different arrangements (Safina, 89). For example, dolphins can understand the syntax of sign-language

sentences. Dolphins ignore nonsense commands and they can learn several dozen human words and

understand short sentences. In the chapter “Killer Wails”, Safina spends more sections to describe

dolphins’ real world and society. He finds it is infinitely more demanding, dimensional, and high-stakes

than a pool with a human or two and a few toys (Safina 313). Toni Frohoff, a behavioral biologist who
 Li 2

specializes in cetacean research, says that cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises and whales) are an order of

fully-aquatic mammals who have engrossed scientists and the public alike with their large complex

brains, impressive intelligence, and social and communicative sophistication（Frohoff, 1）. Scientific

research of cetaceans began in the 1970s and it has contributed much to our understanding of this species;

interest remains high, with new organizations and researcher studies being performed every year.

This review will focus on recent researches in cetacean cognition; however, several historical

studies contributed greatly to the progress in dolphin research and I would like to mention them to give a

brief introduction of how the researchers have developed their ideas. In 1970, scientists Luis Herman

proved that dolphins could retain memories of learned skills. In 1980, Herman also discovered that

dolphins could maintain representation associated with recent events for minutes, which is a process often

referred to as working memory. Moreover, He argued that memory formation and use are foundational to

all cognitive processes of dolphins. Then in 1999, Mercado and Murray questioned the semantic

memories and episodic memory of dolphins; two years later, Lea researched whether human actions can

impact the psychological lives of dolphins. Today, more and more experiments and tests are continuing to

provide details about the dolphin cognition, including the most recent research by Racheal Morrison on

dolphin self-awareness. This review will focus on recent researches in dolphin cognition, analyzed

through self-awareness, social behavior, and ability to interpret human gestures.

Self-awareness of Dolphins

Written by Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss, “Precocious development of self-awareness in

dolphins” focuses on the self-awareness of young dolphins. The main problem two authors solve through

this research is to determine when the young dolphins start to become self-aware. The theory of MSR

which stands for the Mirror-self recognition is an indicator of self-awareness used here. In fact, MSR

testament has been demonstrated in adult dolphins already but this research is the first time that apply it

toward the young dolphins. Therefore, researchers follow the similar strategies with the previous adult

dolphin experiment.
 Li 3

For the method of this research, several sessions were applied in order to train and measure the

MSR of the two young dolphins. For example, the mark test session which exposes dolphins to the mirror

for approximately fifteen minutes is in the purpose to train them to be familiar with an object that could

reflect their own images. Then it comes to the baseline session, in which researchers removed the mirror

and determined how the dolphins behave differently in the previous session and measure the shift of the

movement of them to whether they are self-awareness or not. If their movement keeps the same without

any shifting means they do not recognize the image of themselves but if they do behave in surprise which

shows their cognition of their image in the mirror. The total session of the experiment is 57 and the result

shows that one of them passed the test at an age of two years and seven months, while the other passed

five months earlier (4). Morrison and Reiss conclude that their results indicate that self-directed behavior

at mirror emerged in a dolphin at seven months of age, which is much earlier than that of humans and

chimpanzees.

Social Behavior of Dolphins

In 2006, Richard C. Connor from the Biology Department of University of Massachusetts

Dartmouth, with Rachel Smolker and Lars Bejder, finished the article “Synchrony, social behavior and

alliance affiliation in Indian Ocean bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops aduncus” which mainly discussed about

how synchronous behavior takes place when a group of dolphins swimming. Why is synchrony

important? The reason is synchrony can describe occasions when group members perform behaviors that

show nonrandom temporal clustering. And the data authors taken from is the one being collected during

1987 to 1989 from 20 dolphins in Shark Bay. Whereas the first research was studying the cognition of

dolphins through self-awareness in a mirror, this one studies the topic by observing how they socialize

with and synchronize with each other. Therefore, we will pay attention on the "social intelligence" which

is another aspect of cognition in this research. As authors stated in the essay, all the syncs that tested from

1987 to 1989 samples were supposed to be ignored the fact of socialization of dolphins. In order to
 Li 4

improve the accuracy of the result, the petting which is the social action of dolphins and was not

concerned in the samples from 1987 is added to this research.

The method is to measure from several aspects, such as distance and stagger, time differences,

membership and social behavior. Besides the sample from 1980s, researchers mentioned that they also

added the 2004 samples into the consideration. As the new data has been included, there is a new section

related to synchrony and social behavior which did not be measured in the older samples. In the

discussion section, authors mentioned their discovery about the degree of synchrony with related to the

alliance behavior and declared that it is unique from other mammals. Therefore, the synchrony which

exists in the group activity among dolphins directly shows that each dolphin in a group is moving in a

fixed position to keep the pattern and they have the social awareness of cooperation due to the form of the

team in swimming process.

Interaction between Humans and Dolphins

The research paper “The Dolphin’s (Tursiops truncates) Understanding of Human Gazing and

Pointing: Knowing What and Where” by Adam A. Pack and Louis M. Herman from Kewalo Basin

Marine Mammal Laboratory provides a third way of better understanding of dolphin intelligence by

looking at how they understand human gestures. In this article, authors aim to test the understanding of

dolphins of human pointing and head-gazing which are two main types of joint attention, a form of social

cognition. In the introduction, Herman states that in 1980 he has an early discussion of diverse species on

cognitive traits. Then in 1999 Herman and his colleagues first experiment that dolphins understand the

indicative pointing. Therefore, this research is based the previous research results of Herman’s. They

designed three experiments. One is to identity whether dolphins could find the item by the pointing of

human; moreover, another is a step beyond the first one that is to test how dolphins process symbolic

instructions indicated by people’s head gazing. The last one is the most developed one and it tries to

investigate the understanding of geometry of human indicative cues. The method part of this paper is not

complicated to be understood as it provides a visual component in this section. The result reflects that one
 Li 5

of the two dolphins being tested had no difficulty in selecting the sample object indicated by the

experimenter. Consequently, the sample proves that dolphins do understand humans’ gestures or body

language, so they have the cognition of how to interact with humans through their body languages and

ways of behaving.

Review Conclusion

The first paper is a recent published paper which applies the data which are lately determined so

the experiment is more trustful due to the improve of test strategy and data collection. The second one

which mainly covers synchrony of dolphins adds a new variable to the previous research did and the

researchers improve the experiments used to be done and measure the influence of petting, the social

behavior of dolphins. The last one which is done by two well-known experts in the field of dolphin study

develops some new ideas not considering before. All these three articles try to make a proof of the

existence of the cognition of dolphins; however, authors discuss several points about it, including the self-

awareness, social behavior and the interaction with humans and gesture. The combination of three sources

gives the audience a comprehensive view of the idea throughout recent findings. To talk about the

cognition of dolphins, evidence from various domains of research demonstrates that dolphins have a level

of cognition that is close to that of human.

Problem: Dolphin Hunting

In the literature review, three researches discuss about the cognition of dolphin in different

aspects to give us a comprehensive view. Now we know that dolphins have self-awareness and social

intelligence, even more they could interact with humans. Being a species that has a high level of cognition

and intelligence, dolphin has feelings as well. In another word, dolphins will also feel pain when they got

hurt. Animal hunting is a common behavior around the world, including dolphin hunting. Japan is ine of

the countries that is highly developed in fishing industry; moreover, it is the one that hunts a huge number

of dolphin each year. Hunting dolphins has two main purpose: one is for trade and the other is for food. In
 Li 6

fact, we seldom have dolphin meat for food in the daily life. Most of their meat is likely to be sent to zoos

for feeding predator animals. People usually see dolphins in aquarium. Dolphins are captured and send to

aquariums and zoos to be trained and provides performance for visitors. Most of us have experience of

seeing dolphin performances. It is hard to say that dolphin hunting is unnecessary because we do not have

dolphins for food. However, as some of people can only see dolphin in zoos, we still need hunt dolphins

to send to different places for performance. Therefore, totally stopping hunting is not a wise decision but

we could say that it is vital to prevent over hunting of innocent dolphins which are not used neither for

shows nor researches. The question may be asked that why we hunt pigs or cows but treat dolphins

differently. Pork is a commonly-seen source for cooking not only in the east but also in the west. People

seldom had dolphins on their table, so more than half of the dolphins are killed without any purposes.

That is a kind of waste and over hunting. Dolphin cannot compare to the animals like chicken or pig as

their sacrifices make no sense and bring no benefits nor profits.

In addition, the way that fishermen hunt dolphin is cruel though people acknowledge that

dolphins are cognitive animals. According to Safina’s statement, between last century 50s to 80s, several

countries including Norway, Japan, and the Soviet Union slaughtered thousands of killer whales.

Moreover, there were plenty of events which sound scared. In October 1956, Naval Aviation News

claimed that US Navy had completed a successful mission against killer whales; and hundreds of them

were dead by the machine guns, rockets and depth charges from our army (Safina 378). When the

dolphins are being hunted and shot, they will feel the same as we do, and it must be extremely painful by

being shot and killed. Imagining that if someone used a machine guns and fired on us, then how do we

feel of that. Richard Ryder, a British writer, psychologist, and animal rights advocator suggests a term

called speciesism. 'Speciesism' is the idea that being human is a good enough reason for human to have

greater moral rights than non-human animals. Which means even dolphins can feel pain during hunting,

we do not need to consider that only because we are humans and they are animals. In Ryder’s speech, he

believes that “speciesism” is a social problem like racism and sexism.

Dolphin hunting is not only a serious problem in the last century but also happening today. In

“The Cove”, a documentary movie taking from the point of view of an activist who cares of the marine

environment and puts effort for the protection of marine ecosystem, it records the true procedure of how

fishermen in Japan hunting dolphins each year. The purpose of director Louie Psihoyos is to let more

people know what takes place right now and advocate the world to stop this ruthless hunting of dolphins.

From the documentaries and information released by the organizations like Dolphin Projects, the dolphins

around world are suffering from being cruel hunting and ruthless killing.

(Fig. 1, Taiji drive hunt figures 2000-2016, Whale and Dolphin Conservation)

This graph shows the statistics by Whale and Dolphin Conservation. It is easy to find through the

picture that the dolphins being killed are more than ten thousand only in Taiji, Japan and this number of
 Li 8

death has not trend to decrease in the past five years even after the actions and promotion have taken

recently.

Solution to the Problem

From the data and the information, Japan is one of the places that has a serious problem in

dolphin hunting. However, dolphin hunting is not only a problem in Japan but also a global issue and

each of the nations and individuals has the responsibility to protect them away from the ruthless killing.

Therefore, what are the solutions that could solve this problem. Governments, organizations and

individuals all could help dolphins in different ways including global and grassroot solutions.

Solution by Law

In Japan, the Act on Welfare and Management of Animals are established by 1973. It states that it

is a crime to kill, injure or inflict cruelty on animals without due cause. In fact, this policy is affective to a

large list of animals, but fish are not included, so that is one of reasons that Japan has a serious situation

in dolphin hunting due to the lack of law enforcement. Being different in the United States, there are

several laws are related to the dolphin hunting and dolphin study. One of them is that being published in

1994, which allows the Secretary to issue permits to take a marine mammal for scientific research, public

display or to enhance the survival and recovery of the species in the wild if the permit is reviewed by the

Marine Mammal Commission; also allows the incidental take of marine mammals during commercial

fishing operations. We can find this is one of the ways to protect the dolphins from the wrong use of

research or display forced by federal government. Moreover, states like California and Florida also

establish laws and policies to limit the over hunting of dolphins. The laws and policies are the solution

that government can apply to this issue. Government enforcement is a useful method to protect the

survival and recovery of the particular species and that is how the Congress make rules and dispense

permits to agencies and individuals. By comparison of two countries, Japan and US, depending on

different policies of dolphin protection, the results have a great impact. In 2015, the number of dolphins
 Li 9

being hunted in Japan is around one thousand but the number of that was no more than one hundred in

United States. The data could prove that policy by government is one of the best solutions to help protect

of dolphins from being hunted.

Solution by Organization

Government has its power to protect dolphins but what should we do to help them from being

over hunting and cruel hunting? Some of the animal-protection organizations put their effort into saving

dolphins from hunting. For example, Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) is a worldwide charity

organization which is dedicated to the protection of cetaceans and aims to amaze people with the wonder

of the nature and inspire global attention. They posted a summary on their website stating what the

organization recently has done to help. To better protect dolphins, they consider that raising the awareness

of hurts is important, so they developed a campaign in Japan to educate the public; moreover, the

organization is cooperating with Beautiful Whale Project to bring art and science together for promotion

among citizens. Except education, peaceful protests are recommended by the organization for the

activists. However, protesting is not always an efficient method. If the protests are not well-arranged, it

may bring some drawback and build a negative attitude of the public towards the protection of dolphins.

For example, in holiday many visitors would like to go to the aquarium. Then it will not be a good choice

to protest the trade of dolphin and stop people from viewing the show. Therefore, the peaceful protests

mentioned by WDC is important. The solutions offered by organization contribute a lot to the overall

protection of dolphins.

The social media is also a good way to help educate and advocate. The twitter account of WDC

for example, it has 14 thousand tweets and more than 44 thousand followers which means any tweets they

posted will affect plenty of people and may also be retweeted and advocated widely. Therefore, social

media is one of the best solution for organizations to share their voices and ideas to the public due to its

convenience and efficiency.

Solution by Individual

To protect dolphins from hunting, the best solution must be those that every one could do and

help every day. In addition to the government and organization, what are the solutions that we could do to

take care of dolphins? Richard O’Barry, one of the most famous dolphin defenders writes a guidebook for

every of us who wants to be a dolphin defender on the website of Dolphin Project which is the

organization he founded and aims to end dolphin slaughter and solve captivity issues. There are twelve

suggestions in total. One of the useful methods is that we could contact the government officials like the

representatives in Congress and insist the issues we witnessed in the neighbor area which may be harmful

to the environment and marine ecosystem. Another piece of advice is that it would be great to speak out,

like writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper or magazine. The simplest and the best of the

twelve is to encourage others to become interested in the problem and show them how to help. This is

similar to what we are doing right now, writing a literature review of dolphins and illustrating the issues

the dolphins are facing and promoting to our audience and people around us.

Moreover, solution given by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which is an organization

dedicated to end senseless slaughter is to sign petitions. It makes a big difference as journalist will write

stories about the petitions and influence others to protect the dolphins. Right now, the petitions they

posted online and I share the link of on my twitter has got more than 470000 signings. There is another

solution which is boycott industries that exploit sea life. All the hunting behavior is based on the profit

and money; therefore, if no customers pay for the dolphin show, the business will decrease the purchase

and cut down on the hunting for the less demand leading to less supply.

Solution Conclusion

Arguing about three solutions mentioned above which one is the most efficient and useful, I may

consider none of them separately but simultaneously. Each of the solution has its advantages and

limitations. The laws by government is necessary as all the agencies and enterprises have to work under
 Li 11

the permission of laws and rules. However, government cannot have enough agencies to only work on

hunting issues. Organization can remedy the drawback of that and release some unofficial information

and advocate to public. Besides, individuals are the most important part in solution because each of us

could take part in the protection of dolphins. Our petitions will influence the decision-making of

governors; organizations need individuals to contribute to their activities as well. In conclusion, the

cooperation of governments, organizations and individuals will be the best way to protect dolphins.
 Li 12

Work Cited

Connor, Richard C., et al. “Synchrony, social behaviour and alliance affiliation in Indian Ocean

bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops aduncus.” Animal Behaviour, vol. 72, no. 6, 2006, pp. 1371–1378.

“Ending the dolphin hunts.” WDC, Whale and Dolphin Conservation

Frohoff T, Marino L (2011) Towards a New Paradigm of Non-Captive Research on Cetacean Cognition.
PLOS ONE

“Guidebook for Dolphin Defenders.” Dolphin Project

Morrison, Rachel, and Diana Reiss. “Precocious development of self-Awareness in dolphins.” Plos One,

vol. 13, no. 1, Oct. 2018.

“March 2018.” Discover Magazine

Pack, Adam A., and Louis M. Herman. “The dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) understanding of human

gazing and pointing: Knowing what and where.” Journal of Comparative Psychology, vol. 121, no. 1,

2007, pp. 34–45.

Ryder, Richard. “What is Speciesism?” Online video clip. Youtube. 25 October 2012. Web. 22 February

2018.

Safina, Carl. Beyond words - what animals think and feel. Souvenir Press Ltd, 2016.

Taiji drive hunt figures 2000-2016, Whale and Dolphin Conservation

“5 Ways You Can Help Stop Slaughter of Dolphins in Taiji, Japan.” Care2 Causes