Put Yourself in a Dolphin’s Skin

Humans have come to fetishize dolphins: their smiles, their penchant for heavy petting, and they imbue their frolicking with moral assertions about one’s duty to live with abandon. These projections endear them to us.

But the truth about what’s going on inside a dolphin’s head has very little to do with our human experience. Just as a doctor shudders at colon cleanses, the climatologist at deniers, most cringe at extreme acts of anthropomorphism—the practice of assigning human personality traits to nonhuman animals. The between dolphins and humans, that’s where the beauty lies—in the notion that a nonhuman animal could exhibit such cognitive complexity and yet be so utterly alien to us. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it was dolphin communication that Carl Sagan.