4 - Wednesday, July 18, 1990 - North Shore News Bos HUNTER ° Eco-Logic ® IT WAS the summer of 1976. Along with a couple of dozen other eco-freaks, I had pulled into Honolulu on board a converted minesweeper, the James Bay, renamed Greenpeace VI. We'd spent several wecks in the North Pacific blockading Russian whaling ships. Needless to say, we were popu- lar with the local Hawaiian ceta- cean-lovers. One afternoon, be- tween frantic meetings and publicity activities aimed at raising money so we could go back out after the Russians, I was ap- proached by a long-haired young American who had been placed in charge of two dolphins at a former U.S. Navy training site. In view of our efforts to save whales, he invited the entire crew of the James Bay down to the training site to climb into the water with the dolphins, thereby hopefully getting to know thein on a personal basis. Terrific idea! Besides, by then, we all needed alittle R and R. She dived straight at Gregory and seized his genitalia in her beak. ”’ At midnight, we descende upon the place where the dolphins were being kept. There were two large round tanks with a lone dolphin in each. They had been in captivity for 10 years while the Navy experimented with trying to teach them to carry underwater explosives strapped to their bellies. Obviously, such a mission in wartime would mean the death of the dolphins, but by Navy reason- ing, the dolphins were expendable, and there would be virtually no defence against such fast-moving cetacean kamikaze attackers. The experiments must have been a failure because the Navy had given up and turned the training site over to civilian authorities to be used as an amusement park. The young fellow who'd invited us down started to give us a lec- ture about how we should careful- ly lower our feet into the water to introduce ourselves to the dolphins, and then, once they’d gotten used to our presence, we should ease ourselves into the tanks. But we were an exuberant lot, totally sold on the idea of dolphins as our friends, and so we all simply threw ourselves into the water with war-whoops and squeals of delight. As it turned out, we were right in one case, wrong in the other. Nearly ail of us crashed irto the water with the dolphin in the nearest tank, but one crew member, an ‘‘animal-affinity”’ expert named Melville Gregory, chose the further tank. He also chose to go skinny-dipping. Both the dolphins involved were females, Atlantic bottlenoses. The first dolphin revelled in the ex- citement of a couple of dozen * human playmates. The other dolphin took im- mediate exception to the sudden arrival of a naked homo sapien male in the privacy of her tank, She dived straight at Gregory and seized his genitalia in her beak. He had no idea how many teeth she had, but there were a lot of them, and they were sharp. Needless to say, Gregory froze on the spot. I mean, really froze. With a single muscular motion of her jaws, the irate lady dolphin could have removed Gregory’s manhood. Instead — unlike an ordinary sharp-toothed animal — she simply held on. She didn’t ac- tually hurt him at all. After what seemed to Gregory like an awfully long time (al- though it was probably only se- conds) she let go. And our animal-affinity expert was out of there. Never to return. Likewise, no other male in our motley crew was to venture near that second tank. Gregory had, however, abandoned a wooden flute in his retreat, which we were all quite fond of. In due course, my wife Bobbi and a couple of other female crew-members decided to try to retrieve the flute. They approach- ed the water gingerly, toes first. But the lady dolphin either didn’t mind fellow female mammals or at least thought they had better manners, and allowed them into her tank, whercupon they got to swim with her for a couple of hours The other, more gregarious dolphin proved to be a party animal. She let us ride on her, c!- ing to her underbelly when she dived, and seemed particularly delighted with the stronger crewmen who could wrestle effec- tively with her.’ After a whiie, however, her white belly turned bright pink, and the young American, who had been watching all this while shak- ing his head, advised us bluntly: ““She’s horny.’” At which point, we all quickly removed ourselves from the water. The lesson was clear: dolphins have highly individual per- sonalities and distinctly shifting moods, so much like humans that it was eerie. What brings this anecdote to mind is the news out of Orlando, Florida, that a new computer study shows that dolphins in cap- tivity suffer from stress-related illnesses, including bleeding ulcers, to such an extent that most of them die within ten years of cap- ture or birth, even though, in the wild, they tend to ive for at least 20 years and sometimes last as much as 45 years. In other words, those ‘“‘happy’’ smiles that they wear are caused strictly by the shape of their mouths, and they disguise a tremendous amount of tension, anxiety and probably despair at being penned in. There is a parallel here with bull-fighting. Fans of the blood sport contend that the bulls don’t feel any pain because they are flushed with adrenaline and they don’t cry out. In fact, they have been bred for centuries so that they no longer have functioning vocal chords and can’t cry out. With dolphins, it is a matter of them fooking happy because of their bone structure. Whereas, in reality, the torment of imprison- ment causes them to die — pain- fully, as anyone who has ever had ulcers knows — well before their time. De ne a @ Thief jailed A 20-YEAR-OLD Kamloops man was sentenced July 13 in North Vancouver provincial court to five days in jail for theft under $1,000. Appearing before Judge J.-L. McCarthy, Wesley John Devries pleaded guilty to stealing five lot- tery tickets and other merchandise from a Mac’s convenience store in North Vancouver on Nov. 25, 1988. AN « Clscua « Handycam « ES « myfirstSony"s » \ p& + DIGITAL « & ARDAGH HUNTER TURNER Barristers & Solicitors a Personal Injury AFTER HOURS FFREE INITIAL CONSULTATIONT] pay 645 8989 [986-4366 | 986-9286 #300-1401 LONSDALE NORTH VANCOUVER, BC. PEIN TOMORROW THURSDAY JULY 19, 1990 9:30 AM.T0 9PM. Expect More. We Are Sony. 929 GRANVILLE ST.