Susan Casey's dolphin book

Susan Casey is one of my favorite writers. I love her way with adjectives and verbs.

Ive read all three of her books now. Her first book was about rogue ocean waves, her second was about great whites, and the one i finished today was about dolphins.

I was hopin the dolphin book would be breezy but it was almost too painful to finish. The stuff that humans have done and still do to dolphins/orcas/whales is….almost too much to bear. Slaughter for profit. Torture for profit. Captivity for profit. Lies upon Lies for profit. And on and on and on. The US Navy is a prime source of dolphin-torture, as well as the Oil Corporations (The Navy sonar wrecks dolphin health, the Oil Rigs are even worse, etc)

One tribe in the Solomon Islands has a culture that includes dolphin killing. An environmental group paid the natives off to stop the killing. Made a contract with the local Chiefs. Cept some Island-gangsters stole the money. Soooo, the Islanders decided to round up thousands of dolphins and slaughter them brutally…and continue to slaughter dolphins until they were paid to stop it.
Etc, and so forth and on and on. Stories like that.

A single dolphin sale can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars. So organized crime has gotten involved.

So half the book is full of horror stories. The other half of the book is about how amazing dolphins/whales/orcas are. Their brains and abilities are amazing. For example when scientists study ’empathy’ they can sorta identify what parts of a brain are involved with that. Well dolphins are off the charts with their ’empathy’ brain-parts. They may feel something ‘beyond empathy’ whatever ‘that’ would be.

Anyway, another good book from Casey. Another book that makes the reader hate the Empire, and love Cetaceans.

susan casey:https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-to-talk-to-dolphins-an-interview-with-susan-casey

“….A biologist named Maddalena Bearzi was studying a group of dolphins off the coast of Los Angeles when she noticed something strange. The “pod” (group of dolphins) had just landed upon a herd of sardines. They were about to start feeding—something that usually transfixes the whole group—when one, unexpectedly, darted off.
In moments, the rest followed, swimming full speed out to sea. When she reached them, three miles offshore, the pod had a formed a circle—in the middle of it, a girl’s floating body. Very near death, the girl had a plastic bag with her identification and a suicide note wrapped around her neck. With the dolphins help, she was saved.

“I still think about and dream about that cold day,” Bearzi wrote of the sighting. “And that tiny, pale girl lost in the ocean and found again for some inexplicable reason, by us, by the dolphins.”

Our inexplicably intimate relationship and longtime fascination with dolphins provides a backdrop for Casey’s third book. From bizarre 1950s scientists to a community of dolphin worshippers, it’s an eye-opening look at the world below the sea.

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….Also, the first dolphins lived on land?

Oh yeah. I’ve seen pictures of this and I struggle to know how to describe it. If you look it up the first dolphins you’ll just laugh out loud. It looks like this sort this feral, lupine rodent with hooves. It took them 25 million years to adapt to being in the water. When they first got into the water they were these big, almost dinosaur-like creatures with fangs, they were giant—they looked like those skeletons you see at the Natural Museum of History that look like sea monsters.
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….Beyond captivity, you mention other ways that we are endangering them?

There are tremendous problems in their habitat: overfishing is a huge one, pollution—we’ve outlawed some really bad chemicals but they don’t vanish like poof they’re gone, they bind to fat. Dolphins are filled with mercury heavy metals, insecticides, and flame retardants, all of which weaken their immune system and make them more susceptible to viruses. There’s also a lot of industrial noise from ships and Navy sonar. The sonar is so loud we couldn’t tolerate it—not even close. Some of the dolphins freak out when they hear it and swim to the surface, then hemorrhage and die…. see link..