What If Dolphins Could Skydive? – Animal Intelligence
With guests Eric Mayson and Chance York, we discuss animal intelligence through a variety of stories. We cover skydiving dolphins, painting elephants, talking birds, and militarized monkeys. Ryan advocates book-burning, Spencer reads the autobiography of a horse, Chance thinks something’s fishy, and Mayson finds a bug.
Hot Topics: Soviet Dolphin Paratroopers, There’s A Bug In This Room, Don’t Save The Dolphins, Flooded-Basement Dolphin-Tank Party-Time, Written By A Horse, Yeah But Think About Birds, and much more.
Peter the Dolphin
In 1965, NASA funded a project with the goal of teaching a dolphin to speak through it’s blowhole. Margaret Howe worked with the dolphin, named Peter, trying to teach him english. During this time, Margaret and Peter lived in a house flooded with seawater. Roughly two feet of water covered the floors of the house. Several years ago, the BBC produced a documentary about the experiment titled The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins. Spoiler alert: Margaret jerked off a dolphin a few times, and the dolphin ended up killing itself. Yay!
Alex the Parrot
Many birds are able to mimic human speech. Alex the parrot was different in that he could actually communicate with humans. He had a vocabulary of over 100 words, but also seemed to understand the meaning of the words. When shown an object, Alex could correctly describe its shape, color, or texture. He is also perhaps the first animal to ask an existential question. Upon seeing himself in a mirror, he asked “what color?”. His trainer said “gray”, and Alex then referred to himself as gray. Unfortunately, Alex died in 2007 at 31 years old.
The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins
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