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Chapter Seven a ringside seat in the making of a pet star a ringside seat in the making of a pet star In April of 1993, the tourist magazine Condé Nast Traveler ran a feature on Australia’s top ten beaches, one of which, Monkey Mia, is home to a pod of dolphins that have been cavorting with tourists and beach residents for some thirty years. A two-page glossy photograph of a blonde, suntanned swimmer taking a close-up snapshot of a smiling bottle-nosed dolphin is accompanied by a jarring caption: “The mating habits of male dolphins amount to gang rape, although this is seldom publicized.” It was not the ~rst exposé of dolphin sexual behavior in Shark Bay, Australia. The story broke one year earlier, when Natalie Angier, a science writer for the New York Times, detailed the ongoing research on dolphin sexual behavior conducted by scientists at Shark Bay. Describing dolphin courtship as “brutal, cunning, and complex,” Angier highlighted the aggressive behavior by which male dolphins “collude with their peers as a way of stealing fertile females from competing dolphin bands.” “Dolphins are turning out to be exceedingly clever, but not in the loving, utopian-so157 cialist manner that sentimental Flipperophiles might have hoped,” she remarked.1 This Machiavellian picture of dolphins is as much the product of science, cultural values, and nature as the more familiar image of dolphins as loveable, gentle friends in the sea. Used to market everything from environmental legislation to skin-care products to tuna, the celebrity status of marine mammals is not likely to wane, despite stories revealing a seamier side to the dolphin’s private life. For example, in 1994 the Keiko/Free Willy Foundation, in coordination with the Earth Island Institute, launched a huge public campaign for the rescue, rehabilitation, and eventual release of the dolphin’s close cousin, Keiko, the orca star of the Warner Brothers’ ~lm Free Willy. In his time of need, Keiko attracted $8 million in corporate and public ~nancial contributions, including a $2 million seed grant by Warner Bros., a $3,000 contribution from an elementary school in Kodiak, Alaska, and the donation from United Parcel Service of a C-130 Hercules plane to transport the killer whale from Mexico City to the Oregon Coast Aquarium . Donors were concerned that the adorable killer whale whom they had come to love on ~lm was languishing in captivity in an out-of-the-way theme park in Mexico and was in desperate need of more lavish facilities and care. The ability of marine mammals, and dolphins in particular, to arouse the interests of corporations, public constituencies, the federal government , and science attests to the power that such charismatic species have within American culture. But the dolphin’s affectionate image was made, not bestowed by nature, as a result of the intertwined and sometimes con_icting interests of science, the military, environmental organizations, and the commercial ~lm and entertainment industries—an image that has had a profound impact on the shape of scienti~c research, environmental policy, and international relations in the postwar years. Known as the “pig ~sh” or “herring hog” in the early twentieth century by American ~sherman to denote its alleged voracious appetite for commercial ~sh, the dolphin ~rst garnered big-time public attention in February of 1940. On the north coast of Florida, eighteen miles south of St. Augustine, a captive birth of an Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin was witnessed by biologists , cameramen, and hundreds of tourists through the portholes of Marine Studios and suddenly became a national media event. Life reproduced the highlights of the ~rst dolphin birth recorded on ~lm in a series of stunning photographs. Surprised by the tail-~rst appearance of the fetus, an unchar158 reel nature acteristic delivery position for mammals, the staff at Marine Studios struggled unsuccessfully to arti~cially resuscitate the infant dolphin after the mother failed to bring the baby to the surface for its ~rst breath of air. A _urry of letters from interested readers arrived at the publisher, asking Life to report on the condition of “Mother Porpoise” after her stillborn birth and offering opinions on whether the tail-~rst delivery was normal for dolphins or was symptomatic of abnormal births. One reader, obviously unaware that the mother died nine days after the birth, even sent a photograph taken of the mother porpoise shortly after the birth to prove that she was no longer grieving.2 Marine Studios was not the ~rst aquarium...

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