Margaret Howe Lovatt participated in a highly controversial 1960's NASA experiment in which she was isolated with a young male dolphin for an extended period. The idea was to try to teach him human speech. But the results were disastrous: Peter the dolphin fell in love with her and when she left at the experiment's end, he committed suicide. OH, and the heavy doses of LSD they pumped into him to try to see what the drug would do to dolphins might have been a factor.   It's obviously a freaky and fascinating story. But predictably, what's capturing the internet's attention is the fact that Howe Lovatt had to deal with the dolphin's sexual urges during their isolation. The bestiality angle was the headline 40 years ago, when Hustler ran the story with a titillating image of interspecies sex. Which seems to me, from Howe Lovatt's description of the activity, to be a little misguided:

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"Again it was sexual on his part, it was not sexual on mine. Sensuous perhaps. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch. Just get rid of that. Scratch it and we'll be done. Move on. And that's really all it was."  It's not like she was this guy.

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But wait, she said it was "tender"! And "sensuous" (perhaps)! Maybe if the word "sensuous" was actually interpreted literally, instead of as a socially acceptable euphemism for "sexual" in the female human, people might not be perving out quite so much?

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Don't get me wrong, I think jerking off dolphins is an ethically questionable activity. But I also think preventing dolphins from having their biological needs met is ethically questionable. I'm more interested in calling her out for coming up with the idea in the first place than calling her out for saying she didn't hate it.  

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  A BBC documentary unpacks the whole sad story on June 17th.      

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