Dolphin Days

Please note that parts of this transcript are automatically generated and contain many inaccuracies

Disclaimer

Aqua: The Zooier Than Thou podcast contains adult concepts and language, and is intended for a mature audience. So if you’re too (insert dolphin noise) to have ever actually (insert dolphin noise), you might wanna come back when you’re older.

Blind Date - Cold Open

Toggle:  (as a voicemail) Hey Sam, today’s the day of the big date. I really think you’ll like this guy. We’ve hung out a ton. Really cool. You can meet him at the beach, bring a swimsuit and a towel! Have fun! And let me know how it goes!

Narrator: It was a beautiful day. The sun was high in the sky and the endless expanse of the ocean glinted like it was covered in diamonds. The sand was warm, and the gentle lapping of the waves made the whole place feel like a dream.

Sam: This is the spot, right? Oh man, get it together. Sure it’s my first time going on a blind date, but Toggle reassured me that this was going to be a good fit. Plus, I do love the beach. Now, where is he..?

Narrator: The beach is quiet, unpopulous for how nice of a day it is. Here and there, dotted far apart across the sands, there are a few people lounging, and in one spot some ways far, far, pretty far down the beach, one group of folks has a volleyball net set up. Suddenly, quite nearby Sam, there’s a loud splash from the water. A sleek dark form propels out from the waves, twisting sharply in the air to flip end over end before landing perfectly back down into the waters once more.

Sam: Oh my dog, was that a dolphin? Wow, it really is my lucky day.

Narrator: The dolphin pokes his head out of the water, looking over the different humans who are at beach. Eventually he stops, and his eyes lock on to one person in particular. From his place in the waters, the dolphin then opens his jaw and lets out a series of high pitched clicks, his gaze never moving away from the human who he has spotted.

Sam: Is… Is that dolphin looking at me? They certainly seem to be. (Awkwardly) Uh, hello dolphin!

Narrator: The dolphin dips below the waves for a moment before resurfacing again, drifting along the water casually, like a bird riding a thermal. He comes closer and closer to the shore, before eventually backing up again once the water gets too shallow. But then he approaches again, vocalizing once more.

Sam: Do they want me to come say hi..? Well, this does feel like a bit of a once in a lifetime opportunity. And I don’t see my date anywhere, so what the hell. Besides, how cool will I look if my date gets here and I’ve already made friends with a dolphin?

Narrator: The dolphin looks excited as he watches the two legger enter the water. He drifts along slowly, watching with one eye poked out from the surf as the human gets closer and closer, before finally she’s deep enough. He dives below the water, swimming all around this new being in his domain, before eventually he resurfaces in front of her. His skin glows in the clinging droplets of water with the way the sun reflects against his sleek body.

Sam: Wow… This is amazing. Can I… pet you? Is that okay?

Dolphin: (Chill dolphin noise)

Sam: This doesn’t feel at all like I would have guessed. Who’s a good… uh… dolphin? Sorry I don’t have any fish for you or anything…

Dolphin: (Non-plussed dolphin noise)

Sam: I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but it’s nice to meet you too.

Narrator: The two splash around in the water as the sun climbs up and up and up to its peak, and then, slowly, starts its descent. The dolphin shows just how at home he is in the ocean, jumping and diving, and cutting through the water. The human struggles to keep up, appreciating the majesty of the moment she’s getting to witness. At first, she keeps an eye on the shore, waiting for her date. But eventually she stops bothering. By the time she pulls her way out of the water the thought hits her like a forgotten item from the grocery store once you’ve already gotten home.

Sam: Oh shoot! My date! I hope he didn’t show up while I was in the water and I missed him. I should call Toggle and double check. Thank goodness I brought this towel, just in case. Aaaaand dry hands, yay! Now, let’s see here…

Ring ring

Toggle: Hey, it’s Toggle, what’s up?

Sam: Hey, so, I think I missed my blind date. Do you know if he showed up?

Toggle: I think so. He’s not the type to flake normally. You didn’t see him? He generally knows how to make an entrance.

Sam: Well… It also might have been my fault that I missed him. I might have gotten a bit distracted…

Toggle: Oh? What happened?

Sam: Well, I was waiting where we said, but then this dolphin showed up and we just started swimming together and hanging out and I’ll be honest, I totally forgot to keep an eye on the shore.

Toggle: laughing Ohhhh~? Did you and the dolphin get along okay~?

Sam: Yeah, I suppose we got along really well. Why?

Toggle: Sam. That dolphin IS your date.

Sam: (Shocked) What?

Theme Song

Kynophile: Hey, what can I say?

You’ve got me howlin’ at the moon!

Whoa, don’t you know that love is wild when you’re a zoo?

We’re Zooier Than Thou!

Oh yeah!

Blind Date - What’s in a Name?

Sam: I can’t date a dolphin!

Toggle: Why not? You are a zoo, right? When I asked what you were looking for you said someone strong, funny, charming, and that they need to know how to swim. You didn’t say “no dolphins.”

Sam: I didn’t realize I need to specify!

Toggle: Did you not realize when I said his name was (dolphin noise)?

Sam: I thought it was Italian!

Toggle: sigh People always think it’s Italian. (Anyways,) It sounds like you had an amazing time. Are you going to keep going with the date?

Sam: Well… it was pretty exciting. I did love swimming around with him, and hanging out… I’ve never met a guy like him before… But that’s just the problem! I don’t know the first thing about dolphins!

Toggle: Oh, uhhhh I might be able to help with that. Here, let me send you a video real quick.

Gary and Spin’s Rad Dolphin Video

Gary: Yo yo yo what’s up skater nash (like nation), it’s ya boy Grinding Gary joined by Doctor Spin MD behind the microphone for another radical audio only skating vid for you. Today, we’re hitting the beach to ollie some rails, kick some flips, and Spin’ll presribe you a dose of his signature 180. Let’s get rolling.

(Skating noises)

Spin: Yoooo, sick McDuffy bro

Gary: Check out this 270 heel spin

Spin: Tubular dude..

Gary: Alright, I’m gonna hit the rail grind into the SSX Tricky, get the angle

Spin: Got it bro, send it.

Gary: This one’s for love..

(Skating noises)

Gary: Yoooo, did you get it?

Spin: Nah bro, I got something way better. Look out at the water

Gary: Holy shit, is that a dolphin? Zoom in Doc! Focus! Daaamn, that dolphin just hit that wave like she was verting a pipe

Spin: Yeah dude, people say that a dolphin’s tail can exert like 400 pounds of force while going through the water.

Gary: The same weight as your mom!

Both: ooooooooooo

Gary: Bro! She just hopped the water and did a 360 back drop into a perfect nose dive!

Spin: Yeah dude dolphins are actually mammals, not fish, they have to breath air just like us, so they hop out of the water for sick tricks and also for a lung full of that good O2 y’know?

Gary: Wait.. Did they just wink at us while they were flipping hardcore

Spin: Yeah dude crazy wild, everyone knows that dolphins can sound beam echolocate underwater but they actually have peepers as good as cats or dogs, so they can see out of water too.

Gary: Rad bro! But what’s that noise they keep making.

Spin: Oh dude, that’s their skater tag. Dolphins actually are smart enough to give each other specific whistles to call to individual dolphins. Homie probably wants to make sure to plug in our vid

Gary: That’s siiiick

Spin: Totally sick bro.

Spin: Wait, no way.. Are they going for that trick?

Gary: What? What trick?

Spin: The 720 Triple Heelflip Varial Fakie Backside 180 Shove-It Impossible 360 Inward Bigspin to Switch Stance Frontside 50-50 Nosegrind Disaster Pivot Fakie Out!

Gary: No way bro…

(Splashing noise)

Gary: Did you get that on camera bro

Spin: Nah bro.. That one was just for us…

Gary: Bro..

(And then they make out)

Blind Date - Reassurance

Sam: Huh! That was so educational! Like a half pipe of knowledge!

Toggle: (happy sigh) Right? Those guys make the best gay p-

Sam: Toggle, that was sarcasm! That video wasn’t helpful at all!

Toggle: (the sound of Toggle shrugging) Well, I gotta be honest that’s the only dolphin-adjacent content I’ve seen lately. (sigh) We struggle enough to do horse research for the show. But still. I think you have a really, really unique opportunity here, you’re already farther ahead here than most people have EVER gotten with a dolphin. A lot of folks would be jealous. (Pause) So…?

Sam: I dunno. I’m here on the land, and he’s out there in the ocean. That sounds… logistically complicated.

Toggle: Every relationship has struggles. Is he still there waiting for you?

Narrator: The human looks over to the water. The heat of the day was giving way to a cool breeze as the sun had now passed its zenith and was beginning to sink. A perfect lazy afternoon. The dolphin rolls slowly, floating on top of the water. Then, noticing the attention on himself, he stops rolling idly, and instead faces the shore, with his head sticking out of the water.

Dolphin: (confused dolphin noises)

Toggle: Oh, is that him? Tell him I say hi!

Sam: Heeeee’s a bit far away for me to tell him that. Also I don’t speak dolphin noises.

Toggle: Well, Sam, the way I see it, you’ve got two options here. Give up, or give it a shot. If you’re really not feeling it, that’s okay. But if you want, just keep having fun, and see where things go. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Sam: Yeah, I think you’re right. Okay, I’m gonna go swim around some more. Thanks Toggle!

Toggle: No problem! Go get ‘em!

Sam: By the way how did you call a dolphin to set this up in… (“…the first place?”)

Toggle (cutting Sam off): Byeeee

Sam: Alright, no expectations. Let’s just have some fun.

Narrator: The human tucks her phone away in her towel, before heading back to the water. She wades out into the depths and the dolphin comes back to greet her, eager to continue playing.

Sam: Hey there (tries badly to imitate the dolphin sounds Toggle said for the dolphin’s name)

Dolphin: (Laughing dolphin noises)

Sam: Toggle says hi by the way.

Dolphin: (Pleased dolphin noises)

Sam: (Cute giggle) Alright, well, back to our date then?

Dolphin: (click click click click click etc)

Sam: How about we call you, Click?

Dolphin: (Further agreeable clicking)

Sponsors

Aqua: Today’s episode of the Zooier Than Thou podcast is brought to you by, the Z axis. Are you tired of always only going left, right, forward, and backwards? Do you want to be looking for where your partner is at and also have to check up and down? Try dating an animal underwater today.

Today’s episode is also brought to you by, listener contributions that help us pay for the tools that we use to make one of the raddest podcasts out there. Like, in terms of production quality, what we do is kiiiind of wild? If you want to support the show financially, you can visit donate.zoo.wtf to find out more. That’s donate, dot Z O O, dot W T F.

Thanks for swimming by! Insert dolphin noises here.

Blind Date - Complications

Narrator: The sun was now dipping toward the horizon. The day was nearing its end. The orange glow was captured by the surface of the ocean, giving everything a haze as though it was glowing. The human stopped swimming, looking at the dolphin. The dolphin looked back.

Sam: Hey… I’ve had a really great time today…

Dolphin: (agreeable dolphin noises)

Sam: It’s been super cool swimming around with you!

Dolphin: (romantic dolphin noises)

(Pause)

Sam: (slightly deflated) So uh… Do you have any siblings? I have two.

Dolphin: (ambiguous dolphin noises)

Sam: Oh, uh yeah…

(Longer pause)

Dolphin: (Confused dolphin noises)

Sam: (more deflated) What am I doing…

Narrator: Like a magic spell finally broken, thoughts came rushing into Sam’s head. How would she explain this to her friends? Her family? What would her future look like? How would a human and a dolphin have a house? How would a human and a dolphin have kids? Sam felt overwhelmed by it all.

Sam: I… I don’t think this is gonna work out.

Dolphin: (Sad dolphin noises)

Narrator: The human turns and heads back towards land, leaving the waves. The dolphin looks confused as she departs.

Sam: I can’t date a dolpin. They’re too… different. A human and a dog isn’t toooo much of a stretch… but… A human and a dolphin? That’s crazy! I don’t know why I’m wasting my time. I’m going to call Toggle again and tell him it’s not going to work out.

(Phone noise)

Sam: Hey Toggle, I don’t think it’s going to work out.

Toggle: Aww, I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?

Sam: It’s just… Too complicated. Too weird. Too different. We have nothing in common!

Toggle: Really? You and (dolphin noise) have nothing at all?

Sam: Yeah, nothing!

Toggle: Don’t you both like to swim..?

Sam: Okay, well yeah. But that’s it!

Toggle: And don’t you both like uhhhh… fish?

Sam: It’s not that simple! It’s…

Toggle: Complicated?

Sam: Exactly. (Whispering into the phone as though sharing a dark secret) He eats them raw, Toggle.

Toggle: Sam I’ve seen you at the sushi bar, you’re not exactly afraid of raw fish either.

Sam: That’s different!

Toggle: I dunno Sam, if it’s not working out, it is what it is. But It sounds like you’ve been having a good time. I just don’t want you to give up too early.

Sam: It’s not giving up early. I gave it a shot, just like you said, and while I can’t deny that Click is very cool, and fun to be around, and honestly kind of attractive for a fish…

Toggle: They’re mammals didn’t you learn that in the skit?

Sam: Whatever! Just because I like him a ton doesn’t mean we can work it out! It’s just… We live in different worlds. There’s just too much that we’ll never be able to share.

Toggle: Fair enough. Well, it’s your decision.

Sam: Yeah…

Narrator: The human hangs up the phone and looks back to the water. The dolphin is there, looking up at her.

Dolphin: (Sad romantic dolphin noises)

Narrator: But the human grits her teeth and turns away. She dries off. Gets her things, and leaves the beach. She drives away from the realm of the dolphin, and back towards her safe, normal, human life. Feeling tears well in her eyes as she takes the turn back into town, she flips a switch and the radio springs to life.

Interview with Malcolm Brenner

Tarro: Hello and thanks for tuning in. This is Tara Qua here for Zooier Than Thou, and today we’re joined by a really special guest. He’s an American Reporter, videographer, author, and also Zoophile Malcolm Brenner. Welcome to the show.

Malcom: Hi, and thank you very much for having me on. I don’t get much airplay these days. And oh, by the way, just to distinguish me from several other Malcolm Brenner who were wandering around out there or occur in the pages of history, I identify myself as Malcolm Middle initial J, which stands for John. If you’re really that curious, Brener,

Tarro: All right, I will use that from now on.

Um, But you can just call me Malcolm.

It keeps it easy. so you’re somewhat notoriously known for writing, the book Wet Goddess. I’ve read the whole book. Qua has read it as well. We’re both really big fans.

but just sort of jump into this, I guess my first question is, why did you like, choose to write it? ‘cause like, don’t get me wrong, it’s, it’s very good, it’s very insightful, but I also have to imagine you knew it was gonna cause some controversy going into it. So like, what kind

of was your, your goal there?

Malcom: Oh, my goal was to keep my chest intact because that story was trying to claw its way out, like the Xenomorph alien. Okay. That story was begging to

be told.

Aqua: I know exactly what you

mean.

Malcom: I had encountered a creature, not an animal, not a smart animal, not even a highly intelligent animal, a non-human person who was just as complex, just as aware, just as emotionally involved and capable of.

Love and hate as I was to the point where it became difficult for me to tell the difference between us and when she committed suicide, which she did, and I had a, a nightmare about it, though I was thousands of miles away. couldn’t bring her back obviously, but I could give her death some meaning in my own terms and perhaps give people a little bit of insight into what is really going on in the mind of a dolphin, and why this act of having sex, which is so fraught with taboo and fear and pain and danger and societal condemnation to us.

Is like shaking hands to them. And that’s not my opinion. That’s the opinion of Dr. Ken Norris, a, a scientist. The University of, uh, Santa Cruz, who studied all his spent all his life studying dolphins, was also a big investor in SeaWorld too. But he said, and he was a very conservative guy. I met him.

Dolphins have sex the way humans shake hands. And Dolly was just going out of her mind trying to get me to perform the simple social act with her. That is the story of why it took her six months to seduce me. Because what 20-year-old wants to, you know, confront the fact that they’re sexually abnormal and, uh, find this dolphin just strikingly attractive.

Tarro: yeah, it’s a really great answer. I think it’s also extra complex when you sort of add in the fact that unlike sort of other potential human animal relationships, you have the, a much easier way to sort of be behind closed doors compared to a dolphin that’s living in sort of what’s meant to be like an attraction or theme park.

Malcom: Well, Dolly was unique at the time, and this was 19 70, 71. I was told by her trainer and others that she was the only dolphin outside the US Navy who was trained to work in open water performing alongside a riverboat. And if we had actual video on this, I could show you flyers from the Florida Land Park show, the river Boat show, the dolphins.

She was kept in a sea level pen. not in a pool. There was a pool that was built up on a sort of rocky, um, headland. and that was where the performing dolphins were. I asked, uh, her trainer why he chose her, to work in open water. Did he think she was a, a really smart dolphin? He said, hell no.

She’s about the dumbest dolphin I got. It’s just that I, if, if I lose her, I can afford to lose her. And she did. Dolly went out several times a day. She performed with this riverboat. She jumped 11 feet out of the water and took fish from her trainer’s hand and mouth. He had the utmost space in her sheeted in him.

It was a remarkable to see them working and, You know, whenever she felt like it, she, you know, was Ines and felt like a tumble with the boys and the, uh, eelgrass, you know, they’d just come by, pick her up and take her off. And a couple of days, you know, they’d cancel the riverboat rides until they, she came back.

Um, that was, that was her life up until the park began closing.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: then she’d lost, then she lost her freedom. But that led to some other really, um, astonishing developments in our relationship.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: Yeah.

Aqua: So, um, one of the things that I found interesting about your book is you made a choice to frame it, as semi autobiographical. you know, so you, you create this character,

Malcom: Zachary Zimmerman.

Aqua: Dolly of course becomes Ruby,

Malcom: Yeah.

Aqua: what was, the motivation

for

this? why not simply tell your story?

Malcom: three letters, a,

Aqua: Fair enough.

Malcom: you know what those mean and I presume cover your ass. All the principles. All the principles in this story were still at the time I published it alive. And as far as I know, they still are. I haven’t heard of any of them dying yet, even though, uh, a couple of them could be as much as 10 years older than me.

so, uh, I didn’t want anybody thinking that I had somehow, plucked them out of thin air and, written a tawdry, dolphin story about, what they might or might not have done or been, or seen or said, or where or when. So, that was it. And also I found it just slightly easier as an artist.

I wrote everything with the dolphins as much and as clearly and as exactly in as great detail as I remembered it. But I allowed myself to take little fictional asides and stuff with the human being. It’s just because they set the situation a little more clearly, or, you know, there there were gaps.

I took some parts out of the story and those had to be filled in, with other parts that, introduced the characters that wouldn’t have been introduced later sooner, that kind of thing. all

the little, the little, tic-tac Natalie stuff around the edges of a novel, that you need to do to make it, to make it read smoothly.

And remember, this was my first attempt at a novel, folks.

Aqua: Right. So with Zachary then there was a chance for you to avoid some of the baggage that really wouldn’t have contributed to the story or, or the narrative, and then, fill in details to make it work.

Malcom: Yeah, I probably threw away much more than I published. some of the writing in those chapters is so good that I couldn’t, actually, just consigned them to the dustbin of history. so I, published them as a separate, thing for the people who look like, to look at the director’s cut of a movie as opposed to the cut those butchers in the, uh, corporate office released.

it’s like that you can go and read the, the chapters that I cut out of my novel for what it’s worth. what I found is that they just slowed down. I had to stick always, always, always to the central theme of the story, which was the relationship between the two prime characters. And I always told myself, I really can’t tell the reader anything that I didn’t know at the time.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: So even some of the facts about dolphins are the facts as we knew them in the early 1970s, not the facts that we know today.

Tarro: One of the things that I really, really like about the book as someone who does a lot of writing myself, is that you have a very sort of honest way of writing. It’s almost like, I don’t know if you’ve ever read like a Catcher in the Rye, but it’s used very

Malcom: Yes,

I read Catcher in the Rye when I

Tarro: the sort of. Stream of consciousness style, like story. I think especially with this kind of book, like the level of immersion that you have is, is really important to connecting with the character in the story. And you do like a really good job of putting us in that time and place.

I’m just curious, as like an artist myself, do you think that your history as sort of like a photographer and a videographer sort of, influences your style and being able to like capture moments as well as you do?

Malcom: Yes. very much so. to me, when I’m in the flow, the creative flow writing becomes, like watching scenes from a movie and then describing them in words in as much detail as I need to carry off the scene. and it’s funny because I can’t write a screenplay to save my life, but I can write, I can write books that maybe would make good screenplays if anybody dared to produce them as such.

Aqua: Hmm. earlier you mentioned that when you wrote what goddess, it was important to you that, uh, you not introduce facts or understanding that did not. At the time it happened, so you kept it in period. and, and that included everybody’s understanding of dolphins, their intelligence, their behavior, the way that we interact with them. I

wonder, can you, can you talk about some of the differences, between dolphin training and care and philosophy that you saw in the seventies compared to today? for example, like did Florida Land have any kind of research program? Was it

strictly entertainment?

Somewhere in

between.

Malcom: Strictly entertainment. Florida land was advertised as like six amusement parks in one. Why go anywhere else? Spend all your money here. This was before Disney opened up in Orlando, which is what killed it. deader, than fried chicken, as I heard somebody in politics say the other day.

Aqua: I’m wondering if you can describe some of the differences in,

Malcom: the dolphin training. Well, one of the main differences. it makes a lot of difference to me at least, is that, uh, surveillance cameras are now everywhere. it wouldn’t have done you much good at Florida land because the water there, we have mangroves all around, uh, the shoreline here and, bless the goddess for them because, uh, they protect, a lot of the coast and hurricanes.

But the mangroves, the leaves, turn the water, a rich kind of, tea like brown color. it’s perfectly healthy. There’s nothing wrong with it. The bacteria aren’t up. Uh, it’s just that the water has dyed this dark brown color and you can’t see your hand in front of your face. so, you know, you could have had all the, uh, underwater high definition cameras you wanted down there.

You still wouldn’t have seen anything of me and Dolly getting it.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: that, and, let me tell you a, I think I relate the story in the book, but perhaps your listeners would like to hear it very quickly. I went down to the park one morning in March of 1971. It was bitterly cold as it sometimes is in Florida.

And I was introduced, uh, by the head trainer to a scientist, uh, who was training a dolphin at Mote Marine Labs, just a little way, up the coast from, the park, to see if the dolphin could be trained to protect a human diver from shark attack. And, without getting into the details of that particular experiment, let me say the trainer was there to pick up some frozen fish from the dolphin trainer that I knew and was supposedly taking pictures for. So I meet this guy, we shake hands, and then I say, he says, oh, what are you doing with dolphins? I say, well, you know, I’m not a scientist. I’m a liberal arts student. I go to New college. But, uh, I have this, project to photograph ‘em for somebody’s book.

And, uh, I’m also, uh, you know, doing a lot of readings on them. And he said, oh, what have you read? And I started to say, well, all of John Lilly’s work when the air temperature dropped another 20 degrees Fahrenheit and snow started falling into space between us. And this guy furrowed his brows and he scowled and he growled.

That’s the first stupid thing you said to me all morning. That man is either 50 years ahead of his time, or he’s crazy and most of us think he’s crazy, good day. And he turned around, got into his truck and drove the fuck off just like that. And that, that scarred me so deeply to be treated that way by a scientist, by somebody who is supposed to be, you know, engendering curiosity and a respect for the scientific method.

and, and supposed objectivity. Although we all know that’s a, a myth. Anytime human beings get involved, it scored me and I really, I bear ill will against that guy to this day,

Tarro: I was just gonna say, I think it, it’s really cool that, in the story you actually got to meet, John Lily and, uh, sort of have that conversation sort of later on because I do think, the way it was framed, he always seemed like such an almost antagonistic force in like the background of the story.

And so

being able to sort of rationalize that towards the

Malcom: Well, yes. Yes. Every time I open my mouth and drop John Lily’s name, something bad happens to the character.

Aqua: What I was getting at is, because, about 50 years has passed and, although the scientific method hasn’t changed, our approach to studying non-human animals and trying to measure their intelligence and contextualize it and, and create frameworks for them, which are not the same as humans, but because we are human, we influence, our own understanding of them.

in awkward ways that may not be correct. one of the problems, in the industry today, is an extremely rigid adherence, and insistence on, emotional and rational distance, from another animal that has intelligence all its own.

and there’s some good reasons for that, but.

Malcom: I think you will find that, people like, Diana Rice, who did the, uh, mirror, recognition experiments, along with her partner, uh, or former partner, Tony, something,

Tarro: It’s always how it goes.

Malcom: now, but the people, the people who are now investigating dolphins are showing them a considerable greater degree of respect than say they were shown by like, some French researcher, a friend of CTO’s. Who observed that the dolphin doesn’t need the attachment to the trainer.

It it will respond to the same sign given by anyone. Even the same sign given by a person dressed up like a woman.

you know, the dolphins are basically just mechanical black boxes, which is what behaviorism gives you. It says all animals are black boxes. Maybe they are, but sometimes, sometimes for reasons we completely do not understand. They open the box a little bit and show you what’s inside. And that is what happened with me and Dolly and, If you have any questions about that, I think that is really the, the thing I would like to start talking about, because this was the most astonishing, and for me, the most challenging, the most self-doubting part of the relationship that I really struggled with was the telepathy with her. How could that be happening?

I don’t know, but

Tarro: Yeah,

so that is actually one of the things

Malcom: it did. And how do I know it did? Because in response to our telepathic communications with each other, her behavior changed in the ways we had been talking about. And I saw those changes That’s how I know it wasn’t delusion or, latent schizophrenia or anything being high or anything like that.

She listened to while I was asking of her, and she found it acceptable, and that’s how we finally synchronized ourselves to each other. Enough to make love.

Tarro: Yeah, I wanted to actually ask, now that you bring it up, it’s, one of the sort of more interesting parts of the book is the almost like psychedelic way that you describe some of the, experiences. And I don’t know if you’d even say like the visions that you had. and I was just wondering, I guess it sounds like those are pretty one-to-one to your experience as well, or were those played up for the narrative more?

Malcom: No, no, they weren’t that. That all really happened to me. I got high as a kite one night, laid down on the couch, and it would be called a shamanic journey, except that I think all dolphins are shaming. For what it’s worth. Look, the dolphin mind has been evolving differently, but parallel to ours for 50 million years.

We have got to where we are today because the fact that we have an opposable thumb and four other digits grasping hands from grabbing onto branches to haul ourselves up out of the Jaguar’s way, and swinging through trees. We have become stone chippers and we’ve shipped stones for millions of years, and look where it’s gotten us.

Now. The stones are telling us how to program them you know, the dolphins, they have evolved in completely the opposite direction. They only have the most rudimentary sort of technology. They can’t even open a pop top can. and they have survived, unchanged in their physical form for 25 million years.

And Dr. Wells tell me that they’ve had, the same size brain, the same capabilities as they have now. In other words, for 12 million years, no fundamental change. They have reached a plateau in evolution. They’re not going to get much better at doing what they do us. We just started walking

on our hind legs.

Aqua: so instead of opposable thumbs, then, perhaps, dolphins evolved an enormous capacity for empathy and for inference.

Malcom: Ah, that’s very interesting. Yes. You get into what’s called there in the field of cognitive psychology, a theory of mind, and this is when one animal knows enough about another animal’s behavior to be able to predict what they’re going to do with a reasonable degree of certainty. I might wanna circle back to this, because I have a very interesting, anecdote, to relate to that, that, demonstrated to me that, Dolly had, totally, sussed out, this male dolphin, Jimbo, who was in the pen.

And, uh, who wanted to beat the living shit out of me, if not worse, for, you know, daring to get into the same water as his Delphine. Dolly had her own ideas,

Tarro: one thing that I, I really do wanna ask you, it’s a little bit, off that topic, but, as someone who’s sort of a zoophile advocate myself, I think it’s really, really interesting the way that you are so open and so public with who you are and your experiences in life and things. I just wondered if there’s, like how that experience has been for you. Has it been positive in some ways, negative in some ways. Do you regret doing it at all?

Malcom: Yes, yes. No. I knew when I decided to write this book, and it went through a bunch of different titles before I settled on what got us, uh, I knew, I actually wrote to John Lily about it because I had had some correspondence with him. I hadn’t revealed, my, the extent of my relationship with Dolly.

but in this letter, when I found out she’d committed suicide, I wrote to her about it and said, uh, now I’m thinking about, writing a book, about it. you know, you, you’ve gotten several books published. Would your agent like to take a look at it and do you have any suggestions?

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: Lily wrote back and he said, well, you can do this three ways.

You can write it anonymously, you can write it under a pen name, or you can write it under your own name. And each of those has ramifications. So I thought about it anonymously. who was it? Samuel Goldstein who said, a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. same thing with an anonymous book.

Nowadays, you know, I’m sure they could be written by computers and probably are. And there are probably computers. Ghost lighting as human writers for computers. Um, the second thing, same, same problem. You know, what point is there? No, I take ownership of this.

Nobody is going to tell me what happened. A lot of people are going to try and, you know, if I’d known there were so many thousand people who were therian, knew exactly what went on in that pool under the water where they couldn’t see, I think I’d have asked for a little more privacy, frankly, because every dumb jerk off fucking son of a bitch wants to gaslight me.

Oh, you raped that poor dolphin. Oh, you abandoned that dolphin emotionally. Oh, you should never have sex with an animal, even if it throws itself at you like that Dolphin did, uh, by the way, uh, how big was your long, I mean, was it enough to fill her, you know.

Tarro: Yep.

That’s an experience I get all the

time as well.

Malcom: Yeah, these and these people, they, they

say, you know, throw hi, you know, make Florida’s antibes reality and law retroactive. So Malcolm Brenner can be prosecuted. Um, things, you know, throw him into a volcano. Somebody said recently, good god, what are we going back to here?

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: I was done very bad dirt by, um, a radio.

Uh, and this is on my, my blog by the way, which is a, my website, um, malcolm brenner dot alwin word Malcolm, M-A-C-O-L-M-B-R-E double NE r.com, malcolm brenner.com. that’s got a whole bunch of interesting stuff on it. Uh, some of my, a lot of my dolphin experiences, my press releases, things like that.

dolphins are non-human intelligences, and when you get in the water with them, it may take you a few minutes to realize that you aren’t controlling the situation anymore. And the dolphin will let you know exactly what boundaries it wants you to stay in or break. and very often, I do, Dolly had a little bit of a backstory.

I know she was purchased from a guy who was keeping her in a, a viral plastic swimming pool, a Montgomery Ward swimming pool, a. You youngsters don’t know what a fine institution Montgomery Wards was, but neither do I, a Montgomery

Ward

swimming pool, you know, she was purchased from, uh, this private owner because anybody could own a dolphin back then. All you had to do was get a permit from the state. There was no Marine Mammal Protection Act. That was not passed until 1967, I think. Uh, no wait.

It was not passed until 1971, because it went into effect just after Dolly died. And for that reason, I do not know the exact date of her death. I do know that her trainer told me, that there’s a long story. Basically, she was isolated from this other dolphin, Jimbo, they had sort of pair bonded a typical mating pattern for dolphins.

There’s two males who bond really, really intensely and are like buddies for life. And the female who’s in heat, you know, who wants to be rolled in the eel weed. And then when she’s done with them, she may go hook up with a, moms to be dolphin. Pod dolphins do not have, pods per se. bottle nosed dolphins don’t have fixed groups.

They live in what the, biologists call efficient fusion society, which gives the whole thing a very nuclear cast. But, um, they’re constantly, and it’s important for them to know all these other players and to know, you know, who’s hooking up with whom, you know, where are factions forming? You know, what about the guys from, around the bend?

Are they coming into our territory? It’s this kind of competition within your own species, against other members of your own species that really drives the development of social intelligence. And dolphins have a profound amount of social intelligence. They know who is running the show as soon as they see them.

And the one thing I couldn’t, I couldn’t understand about Dolly. I don’t know why she wanted to have sex with a human being. She never completely explained it to me, but I do know why she chose me.

Aqua: why don’t you tell us about how that happened? Because, it’s pretty clear that you were reluctant, for quite a while and it took some time for

you

to, for her to win you over.

Malcom: I went out with a bunch of other students. This, this is the clearest memory I’ve been able to evoke of this. I went out with a bunch of other students, um, to go down to, uh, the beach on CS Key where I live and, get high. It was about a half an hour drive from the college. so. There are all kinds of problems.

And, as I’m trying to roll this joint, you know, the, the wind is like blowing the pot off the paper before I can get it rolled up. And I’m watching my hands trying to do this, and suddenly it’s very odd. it’s like, what are these appendages, what are they trying to do right now? They sort of look like crabs, but crabs don’t do that.

And then Boeing. I stopped thinking those thoughts, the disoriented point of view disappeared. And I had just rolled a very bad joint, but it was smokeable. And then later on in the car, going back to the college, I re encountered the same phenomena. It was, it wasn’t like an audio hallucination.

There were no voices. It was thoughts. It was thoughts. And they were just disturbingly, cheerful. I mean, I’m always kind of a little bit depressive and these thoughts were just so uplifting and me, and wow, you know, we’re going really fast, aren’t we? What is this thing around me here? the entity just, seemed to be really impressed by our, by human technology. I thought, God, I’m fucked up. so what I decided to do was humor it and, and I took it on onto the, onto the roof of the car, because when you’re in the astral, as anybody knows, you can go right through solid substances in your imagination.

and I showed her, you know, everything that we could see. We were speeding down the highway, roads were laid out before us, and all around us, all these electric lights, it was dark at night. you know, there were satellites, overhead and the stars and everything, and she just flipped out and went, ah, and it was too much.

I overloaded her, but it got rid of her. Well, she didn’t, she kept coming back with. This really nauseating happiness and just effervescence. And finally, um, I got tired of it and I just, I just put the key, you know, put the, put the turn screws to her and I said, look, who are you? And she said, oh, you have to guess.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought I was going nuts. I really, really did. Now since then, my first wife had a half brother who is schizophrenic, and I know what schizophrenia is like. It’s a terrible disease. It breaks your mind.

I got to the point once I guessed it was Dolly, because let’s face it, I don’t have a huge, roster of, ineffable, spiritual beings that I normally do truck with. So I arrived at the, as a last resort that this thing could possibly be Dolly.

And all I can tell you is that in my mind, she lit up like a pinball machine when you’ve just scored a hundred thousand points, bells, whistles, and lights. She was so happy to be recognized for being who she was. And that was the start of our relationship, telepathically. Now since then, I’ve discovered there are a number of other authors around the world, all of them so far, men who have had and written about telepathic experiences with the dolphins.

They trained all of them were trainers. One of them, I come to think it was the French Freer Jacques Meel, who was sort of like the model for the film, the Big Blue, if you ever saw that.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: Me? No. Okay.

Aqua: A long time ago.

Malcom: Yeah, me too. Well, it was made a long time ago. and I know I started off naively thinking that I could write to scientists about this and expect some kind of a response, but then I realized that without their funding sources, they can’t conduct their research and their funding sources don’t like anything.

That sounds woo. Partly because of the. Lingering pollution from Dr. John c Lily, who was giving his dolphins acid. He was in his lab down in the Virgin Islands and taking it himself too, and copy his quantities. He had a way of overdoing things Lily did. he’s atop for another show in itself. He was a character, though you could tell.

I mean, he, he, he started out this very rigid orthodox scientist. And then little by little, you watch his methodology sort of slip. it was suggested by his partner in studying the dolphins, Dr. Gregory Bateson, a very famous English ologist, that if Lilly wanted to talk to the dolphins, it might first be necessary to prove that the dolphins could actually talk to each other.

And he proposed a very simple experiment to demonstrate that. Lily just said, what are you talking about? Gregory and Bateson and his wife packed up their shop and left the lab. they just weren’t seeing eye to eye. And as a result, Lily never did, uh, the background work. He never laid the foundation for, any, any convincing demonstration that Dolphins could learn English.

And unfortunately what happens is I think dolphins make emotional attachments to each other and to the people or the other dolphins that they love. Remember, they’re out in the ocean. They can’t sleep with both halves of their brain at a time because A, they’ll forget to breathe and drown or suffocate, not drown, and or b they have to keep one eye open and swim in a circle so that they can look for sharks, and they can only really relax when they have a white, sand bottom because then they can see a shark coming.

The only place a dolphin has stereo look at their eyes, their eyes. I’ve, I’ve just got a screensaver here of dolphins that’s come up on my computer. And their eyes on either side of their head. Now they’ve got about, two, 180 degree hemispheres of sight, but the other place they’ve got stereo vision is below them.

Right down under them. So if they wanna look at you and see you in stereo, they throw their chin up and they look at you like they’re looking down their nose or where their nose would be if they had one. the function, the, the adaptation there is where is a shark going to come from? You’re swimming at the surface, you’re rising every few minutes to breathe.

A shark is going to come from underneath you, rising up towards you, and that’s where you deed the stereo vision. Everything else is handled by your echo location, which the Navy wishes it had something like.

Tarro: Yeah.

Malcom: dolphins echolocation can tell you everything about an object in the water except its color.

it can tell you, you know, whether it’s breathing, dealing with an air, breathing mammal or a fish. it can locate your bones and your body. I’ve even had it used on me as an element of foreplay, because one of the things that Dolly did to me as we were progressing towards making love is that she came very close.

My, I had, I had, my penis was erect and I, I was embarrassing ignition. I kept a pair of shorts on.

There was a reason for that though. Okay. If I was naked in the pen, it wouldn’t matter whether I was having sex with the dolphin or not. If anybody saw me, they would think I was.

But if I had enough time just to stick that old pecker back inside my shorts and zip it up without patching the foreskin, uh, that really hurts.

they might be willing to give me, you know, they would throw it, would throw an incremental doubt into their mind.

Tarro: Yeah.

Malcom: so I kept my shorts on and my penis was coming out through the fly and Dolly came very close to it, about six inches away, and she began to echo locate on it. And Deco location is a very high series of clicks.

They can go up to like, 200,

uh, K Hertz. Yes. And, and for I think around two 50 is, is about the limit. But

my penis began to vibrate without her touching it. It was an indescribable sensation. And they can do this of course, for women too, if they went by focusing the echolocation beam on your clus. And they

do it for each other.

Aqua: buzzing.

Malcom: Yes. A buzz job. That’s it. Yes.

Aqua: So it sounds to me like this is an inversion of what non zoos think actually happens most of the time. Uh, which is a human is, imposing their will and their desire onto an animal that would otherwise not be willing. And, we’re an hour into it, so it’s inevitable that we start to discuss consent a little bit, we kind of have been wandering around this issue for a little while, but, one thing that really hasn’t changed, perhaps it’s actually worsened, is, like a modern focus on consent and, all of the dynamics therian and whether or not we’re projecting too much humanity onto a being where it doesn’t belong. I think that, that we can agree here that especially in the water, dolphins are not helpless.

Malcom: now you are helpless.

Aqua: and it would be really, really difficult to force them.

Right? So it would be difficult to force them

to do something that they haven’t agreed to do.

Malcom: Exactly. A dolphin can disarm and render helpless. A three man Navy seal team in about one minute. All their weapons are useless. The dolphin moves in and out so fast, uh, they can’t shoot it with a spear gun, first of all, it rips the respirators out of their mouths so they can’t breathe.

Then it rips their masks off so they can’t see. Then it rips their flippers off. And I, believe me, I talked with a woman who had a navy trained dolphin end up living in her canal because its trainer, got cold feet and decided not to, you know, work for the war machine anymore and released it. Dolly Finn was its name and, she swam up the coast and came into this, canal where this woman, uh, and her family kind of adopted her.

the woman would say she’d often get woken up on Saturday morning by divers, you know, standing there, with your, you know, fins in their hand and everything, saying, lady, would you call off your fucking dolphin? Dolphin had been trained to disable swimmers.

Now, there is no truth, I think, to, the notion that dolphins have been trained, like they are, were in the Robert Merle novel, the Day of the dolphin, to blow up boats or to attack divers or anything like that. Yes, they could, they can disarm a diver, but you don’t wanna kill the diver. You want the diver pushed up to the surface and they get a, they get a sea lion to do that.

The sea lion clamps a line on the, uh, the enemy diver’s leg, and they just reel him in. you went to interrogate him. You went to find out where he’s coming from. You know how many people there are, where the weapons are stashed. You don’t want a dead diver on your hand. And the other thing is, they just discovered that compared to a torpedo, dolphins were not a really reliable weapons platform.

In other words, they don’t always go where they’re pointed

Tarro: Yeah.

Aqua: my experience with Dolphins is that they’re, uh, they have opinions and, kind of a transactional. Would you please? Maybe. Okay.

Malcom: Yes, exactly. Gee, a nice set of teeth you’ve got there. Can you let go of my leg? Now you’re just at

the point of pain. Yeah.

Tarro: Yeah.

Malcom: Well the interesting thing about them is they’re so damn judicious they never hurt you more than they need to, to get their message across. I mean, Dolly, at one time, she was getting so fed off with me.

I wouldn’t have anything to do with her sexually. She started masturbating on my, on my sneakers that I was wearing into the pool, rubbing her genital slit on them. And I get a lot of shit for saying genital slit and d and lover. But that’s what marine biologists call it. And that’s what I’m calling it.

‘cause what else am I supposed to call it? A pussy? so anyway, I didn’t want her to do that. I wanted to keep this all above board. I wanted to talk about fishing and the tides. not. Bizarre Dolphin. I thought she was neurotic, which I don’t think she was anymore. But what I did was I just pulled in all my limbs and I rolled up into a ball and I thought, okay, there’s no, there’s nothing, there’s nothing for her to rub on now, you know, I’ll just, as long as I can hold my breath.

Well, she wasn’t taking that. She began battering me into ribs and as soon as I, you know, unfolded and, and grabbed a breath at the surface, she threw herself on top of me and pushed me down to the bottom of a 14 foot pool. And on the way down I remember thinking, gee, I wonder she’s going to hold me down here.

Tarro: Yeah.

Malcom: This is a very awesome thought to be having. You have lost control of the situation. Human. We are not often put in this position, you know?

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: when we are, it ends up tragically like Siegfried and Roy, you know, where the guy got mauled by a tiger. Well, dolphins can do that. They have four different ways of killing you from instantly to rather slowly, you know, if they want to.

but, they are lethal and they’re totally cold-blooded to their prey. You know, believe me, when they kill something, they don’t, they don’t lose any sleep over it.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: They meant to kill it.

It’s dead.

Aqua: so let’s talk about like a more subtle kind of force that, is an argument against, human animal relationships like this.

and it’s, this is an argument that I personally have a difficult time resolving compared to some others. and that is of, perceived inequality and power between the individuals, you know, where the animal, the non-human animals assumed to have little or no power in a relationship with a human caretaker, uh, that automatically makes the non-humans consent, suspect or invalid. And, dolphins to me are, are kind of an extreme example of this because of their intelligence and because of their enormous advantages in their environment compared to humans, they’re so aware of their circumstances, that the argument goes well, it must be coercion then, because they, they understand the nature of their captivity and the

nature of the relationship they have with their human caretakers.

Malcom: All that falls apart with Dolly. what that scientist said to me, that guy is either crazy or he is 50 years ahead of his time. This is both true. Okay. John Lilly was crazy. He was crazy like a foxes crazy, but he took a lot of acid too. And secondly, he was 50 years ahead of his time ‘cause he was the first person to see that hiding behind that silly fixed dolphin smile orus.

There was a very powerful brain. What began freaking me out was when I realized that Dolly had backup plans if I wasn’t doing a. Try B. she could lead me in one experience. I was trying to get her to repeat, uh, her own name. Dolly, it’s sort of a little bit based on the, the Margaret, how Peter, dolphin experiments.

Just, just, not nothing, nothing formal, and, all I could get back from her was a certain kind of squawk. I couldn’t even repeat it if I wanted to. But, suddenly she changed and she’d be being, making another kind of sound. And, in a few minutes she had perfectly mimicked every part of Dolly that she could, so that it was began with a consonant D sound.

There was this weird squawk in the middle, and that it ended with e and uh. I thought, wow, this is really going someplace. And then she stopped making that sound after three or four repetitions, which of course is nowhere near enough to, uh, get you any kind of, scientific merit.

and an interesting thought came into my head.

She was looking at me right in the eye and I thought, isn’t turnabout fair play? Why don’t I try imitating her? See, this was the thing. I didn’t have an agenda. I was there to take pictures. I wasn’t there to train the dolphins. I wasn’t there to make the dolphins do anything. I wasn’t there to give them veterinary checks.

We could just play and we could have in, in, in moments when everybody else was not around us. We could have these moments of intense intimacy. So I started mimicking the sound she was making and she would change it a little bit and make it again, and I would follow the changes. And I thought, my God, she’s, she’s need to be somewhere where is this going?

And suddenly had dawned on me that I had just made the sound that she had made in the beginning of this whole experience that she wanted me to make back then, which I didn’t wanna make. She had tricked me into making the sound that she wanted and what that sound means. It sounded kind of like,

I don’t know whether that was her name for her or her name. For me, it meant something. Dolphins do name each other. They even gossip about each other when they’re not around. They know because they hear dolphin A and B, you know, using dolphin C’S signature whistle when he is off hunting or something.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: I mean, I’ve flipped out when I had that realization and when Dolly saw me flip out and realized I had had the realization, she flipped out and went splashing around the pen, throwing water into the air, you know, beating things with her tail. She was just, and then a boatload of, I, I mean, a, a train of tourists showed up and the whole atmosphere just fell apart.

It just, it just, just like a beach ball, you

know, with a knife stuck in it. I left her and I went back to watch the Dolphin show in the main pool and. Our relationship was full of a lot of strange and irrational activities on my behalf like that, just as it was on her behalf. But eventually,

eventually we discovered that, I know this is going to sound cliche and out of the sixties, but we were both in relationship to each other coming out of the same place. We

were like two

halves.

Aqua: Do you think, uh, if Dolly didn’t have the degree of freedom that she had, that it would’ve changed the circumstances a little bit.

Malcom: Well, she didn’t actually, the, uh, the admitted Florida land, uh, shut down in June and she wasn’t shipped out till September. And during that time, She was taken out of, out of her sea level pen, and moved up back to the main pool, which was quite a long pool. It was about 200 feet by a hundred feet, and part of it was divided with, uh, metal, uh, not chicken wire, but uh, like hardware cloth fencing into, smaller pens.

so, eventually she, she and, this other dolphin, Jimbo, were just the last, two dolphins that were hanging around therian. we got together on the last day I was going to be in, uh, Florida before I, uh, set off, to see my family in Pennsylvania. And then I was going out to Evergreen State College for a year, which was probably the worst choice I ever made in about anything in my life.

Because once I got out there, I couldn’t get to be where I needed to be, which was near her. and, I think that contributed to her death, to her, uh, depression and, and suicide. Now, let me tell you something about, I, I told you earlier that I wanted to tell you about theory of mind and how I know that Dolly could figure out what another dolphin was thinking.

Okay? I went down to the park on that last day without any real expectations about what was going to happen. I mean, I really wanted to make love with her and I’m pretty sure that she wanted to with me. And it’s not, that’s, I’m not talking about having sex here. I’ve had, you know, a couple of dozen girlfriends, been married twice, got one kid by my first wife.

I am not sexually inexperienced. You know, I know the difference between fucking having sex and making love and. All three of them are good, but making love, uh, is really it. It is very often transcendent. You, you seem to merge the sense of identity with the, with your partner when it’s good. anyway, she was in, this, pen with Jimbo, the male dolphin, and this was going to be a problem ‘ cause Jimbo wasn’t all that friendly towards me.

He, he knew there was something going on between me and Dolly. so I, uh, thought, well, okay, let’s see what happens here. I’ll get in the water. So I got in the water and um, I see this dorsal fin at the surface come streaking towards me. And then Dolly comes in, from the side and there is this tremendous impact.

I was about 10 feet away and I felt the shockwave through the water. I don’t know what she did to him. But, there was a slight bit of blood on her and he left me alone after that. But that scared me so much. I got into a rowboat that was in the, uh, in the pen, a little aluminum skiff, and I sat there, thinking I didn’t went to open there.

There the, pens, uh, had latched doors that you could let the dolphins into, bigger or smaller pens that way. And this pen had a door to another pen. But these weren’t my dolphins as you know. I didn’t own them. This was not my place. You know, I had already chased off a couple of, service guys who had been there when I got there.

and, I really didn’t feel that it was my prerogative to open the gate and let Dolly into another pen so we could fuck,

Dolly. Swam over to a place where there were some boards sealing up a gap between the two pens and she positioned herself in front of the whitest of the gaps in those boards.

And it wasn’t, it was maybe like one inch on either side wider than her body going through sideways. Okay. Because she’s a little bit thinner, sideways. Well, the dorsal thin, you know,

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: she rolled on her side and she swam between these two boards, and I was frightened to death that she was going to get trapped in there, that she had, I mean, she had to collapse her lungs, which dolphins can do voluntarily to get through this space.

It was so narrow. Then she turned and, and, uh, 90 degrees and brought her flues through and she was in, and she stuck her head out of the water and said, in so many words, come on in the water’s fine. And we we’re alone. Now he can only hear us. He can’t do anything because she knew. Dolphins have an instinctive, almost instinctive fear of getting caught in narrow places like that.

Rick o’ Barry writes, uh, the Dolphin trainer for the Flipper TV show you, he couldn’t get them to swim into a, into a fake cave that they made underwater. You know, it’s the whole thing about having, its something interfering with your blowhole. You can’t get to the surface and breathe. So he wasn’t going to do the same trick she’d done.

he couldn’t figure it out. And I fucking, I cock olded him in that pen with her. This is so astonishing to me. He’s on the cover of the book. That’s not Dolly on the cover. That’s Jimbo.

Aqua: Oh,

interesting.

Malcom: And he was, yes. I, I added the background in, a little bit of darkroom magics. That was before we had Photoshop and we had to make do with, you know, pieces of black paper and things.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Malcom: but, the amazing thing was, she took me underwater, by the way, as we climaxed, and I know she climaxed because she vo, she, she vocalized just like many a women I’ve heard. She went, oh, oh, oh. Just like that. Except we were underwater and I couldn’t say anything myself.

Tarro: Yeah,

Malcom: gaslight me about that too. Oh, she was scro in pain.

Fuck ‘em.

Aqua: So, I want to, I wanna briefly share, uh. A little bit about one of my, uh, dolphin encounters.

Malcom: Oh, I didn’t know you had

any.

Aqua: yeah, several, under much more tightly controlled circumstances, too bad. But, of course, the first experience is the one that is burned into my memory. and that was when I was on a vacation and a few of us had taken the time to, find a program that we thought respected dolphins and took adequate care of

Malcom: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: support it. And, intellectually, I had some idea of what to

Malcom: I’ve, I’ve been to one place down in the Keys, and I’ve been to The Bahamas too, so I had been thinking about this, before the, the adventure for a little while. So I had some idea, I thought about what to expect and I was right, but I wasn’t right enough. And, the two things that surprised me the most were the warmth. you know, because most of the things that I would encounter in the water, are cold. And it just never occurred to me that there would be another warm-blooded person there. And that it would be so obvious.

Aqua: but the, what really stopped me was, when, uh, we, locked gaze

and, I don’t know how to describe that except to say that it felt like time stopped

Malcom: That’s very interesting to hear you say that because I had, it wasn’t enough time stopping that happened later, but when I, when I was hanging on right after we finished making love, Ruby Dolly swam up to me and laid her snout on my left shoulder, and her eye was about maybe three inches from mine. She just looked into my eyes, she dazed deep into my eyes and it was like, it was like time rolled back and I could see just infinite.

In times past I, I couldn’t put my finger on any of it, but it was definitely a profound mystical experience.

Aqua: Yeah,

Malcom: And that lasted about

a minute

Aqua: mine was very short. It, it was

only maybe, uh,

Malcom: yeah.

Aqua: oh, that’s lucky. Mine was maybe 20 seconds. but in those 20 seconds, uh, It felt like time stopped or changed and,

Malcom: Yes.

Aqua: I don’t know how to describe it other than I felt like I had been seen more completely by the dolphin than I had by most humans. and also interrogated,

Malcom: Interesting.

Aqua: which, apparently

I, I passed the test because, you know, the rest of the

encounter,

Malcom: gave you the impression that you’d been interrogated

Aqua: I was very, very closely examined. it’s a cliche for movies, you know, how someone will squint and try to judge a person’s character and then agree to something a bit outlandish.

It felt like that, but it felt more innocent and lot more powerful.

Malcom: Wow.

Aqua: that brings me to, for now anyway, and I don’t know how much longer this will last, but humans don’t have conventional technology, that enables us to directly experience the mind of another being, not even another humans. how much do you think we need to know a partner in order to satisfy our responsibilities to each other?

Malcom: What responsibilities would be my question because I mean, to this day I still wonder where Dolly came from, what her life experience before she came to the park was. Questions I can’t answer. you can satisfy a partner’s need for love for sensuality. You can satisfy a partner’s need for stability and longevity.

They don’t all fit into the same teacup. My friend. No, they don’t. Be specific and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what the odds are. I’ll try.

Aqua: Okay. how about three different ones? caregiver, friend and lover?

Malcom: Well, a caregiver, bears with it. I think the most responsibility and, you see lot of rage and hostility coming out of these people who got into giving, becoming dolphin trainers because they thought, I can take better care of them than the next guy. Well, you can’t, if your boss won’t spend the money on a fucking adequate filtration system.

Now, can you. You’re just gonna have to muddle along the best you can. And it was cheaper to replace a dolphin that died than it was to fix the problem that killed it. Very often that was true until the introduction of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and now the Dolphins, they’re catching off.

Taiji Island in Japan, the ones that survive the drive hut and are picked out for their exquisite beauty and good appearance in Oceanarium go for $150,000 each without training. That’s what the fishermen, they can make so much more money selling dolphins than they can fish. And of course, the yakus all into it too.

I don’t know much about that, but they’ve got their finger into everything that goes on in Japan. it’s a sad story, you know. I just hope that, um, actually the dolphins could teach us to be more humane. You know, they don’t have anything. Yeah. You hear all these stories about, oh, dolphins, rave dolphins kill infants, and stuff like that.

Well, I’ve got news for you, Chester. Humans do that too.

Doesn’t keep us from proclaiming ourselves to be the top of the fucking dung hill here on land, does it? And the dolphins are the top in the sea. I mean, there, there was a recent, it’s, I think it was called Killers of the Ice or something. It was about killer whales that are now inhabiting the Arctic waters.

And this pack of four killer whales spent two hours trying to break up and wash this one seal off of little, a little ice flow. They attacked it repeatedly. They tried to wash the seal off. Their determination was not just intense, it was irrational. You know, they weren’t going to get enough calories from that one little seal to make up for all the splashing around.

They’d done well by God. They persisted and they did it. Were they teaching their kids? Were they just obsessive compulsive? I don’t know. But damnit, there are some other minds to explore here, gang. And if I can do telepathy with dolphins, I was psychic as a fucking box of hammers. Okay? Maybe just maybe the dolphins would be willing to teach us how to communicate or resist being communicated with by those people at least Beaver calls the visitors who seem to have their own, uh, their own agenda for us.

And let’s not forget. Many UFOs are seen coming into and going out of the sea. Who knows what’s going on in the sea Dolphins.

See, there are all kinds of great reasons why we should be talking with the dolphins, but there aren’t. There isn’t a whole lot we can teach them about how to live better. They are maxed out in that department, and I wish them, I’m sure that humans will be a sad, long lost whistle that the dolphins mothers tell their children in the night about how they were once these strange alike creatures inhabiting the planet, but something bad happened and they’re gone now, but they were fun while they lasted.

Tarro: Hmm.

Malcom: That’s about it, folks. I think I’ve shot my wad.

Aqua: Fair.

Tarro: thanks so much for coming in and talking with us today.

Malcom: It is been very nice.

Aqua: Yeah. Malcolm, it’s, it’s been such a pleasure.

Malcom: yeah. And tell me Aqua

Aqua: Yes.

Malcom: Aqua, I just gotta know something. Do you wear shirts with button down collars Because your voice sounds like a person who does.

Aqua: Guilty is charged.

Malcom: Wow.

Tarro: I’m sure you’re, you’re far from the only dolphin attracted person that’s out there. Um, I mean, obviously there’s plenty of stories about it. Uh, I know in fact there are quite a few people listening to the show, who, who have that attraction as well. Uh, just as we wrap up here, did you have any message you wanted to leave with other people that love dolphins in the same way that you do?

Malcom: Don’t patronize dolphin prisons.

Any place that isn’t a natural environment for a dolphin is a prison. I’m gonna make an exception here for, uh, those, places that are now being set up as as rehab areas for captive dolphins. They have huge bays and things that are netted off, but a pool, a pen, a swimming pool, a phone booth, your bathtub, they’re not, the creature

from the shape of water guys.

They belong out in the ocean all the time. That’s all. would like to see them

Tarro: Fair.

Aqua: Really well said.

Tarro: Yeah. Thanks so much for being here. everyone listening, please, uh, check out what goddess, uh, you can get it in. Uh, most major book retailers. Please check out, uh, Malcolm’s website as well. your YouTube, channel. I think, uh, the videos that you have on there. Also really cool as well.

we’ll be back with more Azure than Thou right after this.

Blind Date - Resolution

Narrator: The car is stopped. It has been stopped for a while now. Sam paces beside the open door, in the parking lot of a scenic overlook, some ways up the coast from where the date had been. She had had a breakthrough, at some point, while listening to the conversation on the radio. Other humans have loved dolphins before. It wasn’t impossible. The difference was… it couldn’t look the same, as it might with another human, because it wasn’t SUPPOSED to look the same. Not even the same as it might with another species of the land, like a pony or a Malamute. Visions swirled in her mind’s eye of a life pulled between the land she could live in, and the water she was being called to, invited to insistently, so insistently, a world of echoes and currents, dimensions up and down that dizzied her as she tried to acclimate to them after a life lived on the surface, a life lived in such a rigid society of stone-chipping tool-makers…

Well, the tools had some use, at least. As Sam paced, she had eventually gotten on the phone with a friend once again, and for a while now, they have been talking, sharing thoughts with one another, from a distance.

Sam: My thoughts on it were so… zoomed in. It was like, here’s this other world, this other life, that’s trying in every way he knows how to show me the bigger picture, and I’m just like, “Wowww, swimming…” (Giggles at herself) Maybe I needed the space, or, the time… just for a moment… to back up, and see all of this, in full.

Aqua: (nods) To see the forest through the trees. Or, the dolphin suitor through the mangroves?

[*Aqua’s nod is likely not perceptible due to Aqua being a sphere and also Zooier Than Thou being an audio format.

Sam: (Polite laugh) Something like that.

Aqua: Midniiiiight… On the waaaaaater!

Sam: UGH… aqua, that’s my dad’s roadtrip music.

Aqua: And it’s perfect. Click’s livin’ rent free in there. But I’m sorry, I get it. I know this is a big deal.

Sam: I understand what I’m getting into.

Aqua: It’s different for everybody though. Pearl went all in a few years ago, during lockdown.. I think she’s somewhere in the keys now. She spends as much time on the water as possible. But even she has to go ashore to Winn-dixie, the laundromat, work conferences… but that’s… that’s it really. We never see her. Her family comes first.

Sam: Yeah…

Aqua: You have to find the right balance, if you can, whatever makes you and Click both happy.

Sam: what if we can’t?

Aqua: Then it ends. You tried. And it’s sad, and it was worth trying instead of never knowing.

Sam: …

Aqua: Sam… I can’t tell you what you should do here, but I think it’s like any other big choice between something familiar and something unknowable. Are you scared of trying or making mistakes?

Sam: Regret.

Aqua: I don’t know anybody who ever regretted the time they got to spend with dolphins. Every second is a gift, and when it’s over, you were there.

Sam: Thanks for chatting with me, Aqua.

Aqua: Any time.

Sam: Will do.  Moikka. Aqua: Good luck.

Narrator: Sam hangs up the phone, gets back into her car, shuts the door, turns the key in the ignition, and leaves the parking lot. She drives back towards the beach where she and Click had met, not long ago. By the time she arrives, the sun has set, and moonlight and starlight alone illuminate the beach’s sand and the choppy surface of the saltwater. Walking down to the water once again, Sam sees Click there, in the moonlight, waiting for her. And, also… Sam sees another dolphin, swimming in the waters nearby Click. Sam arrives at the edge of the water, and wades in.

Click: (dolphin noises)

Sam: I couldn’t stay away. I’m sorry I did go away… I’m sorry I was scared. Your world is so different than mine, and I just. I didn’t know how to deal with that. (Looking to the other dolphin) Is this… a friend of yours?

Click: (dolphin noises)

Narrator: Sam realized, then, that the other dolphin was more than a friend. And Sam was reminded again of how much Click knew. He was aware of the terrestrial boundary as much as she was. He had a life in the water as much as she did in the land. But, there was some room, maybe room enough, where the venn diagram of the two of them overlapped. Click was inviting Sam to fit into his life if she wanted to. And Sam, in turn, said,

Sam: I want to try. Do you… Do you think we can do a second date..?

Dolphin: (forgiving dolphin noises)

Sam: Oh Click…

Narrator: And there, in the heart of the night, the human and the dolphin became as one. They hugged each other close, and shared in the pleasures of their different bodies. The moon shone bright above them, and the other dolphin swam around them, a witness to this new love.

Sweet Snowy Day

(Instrumental)

Outro

Eggshell: Thanks friends for listening to Zooier Than Thou!

Toggle: The next full moon is a blue moon! That’s an extra moon, which means we’re taking a vacation! We’ll be back at it on May 31!

Eggshell: It’s bound to be in May, so don’t miss it!

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Toggle: Share this episode with a friend who warbles, clicks, whistles, and squeaks! Or anyone who likes fun interviews!

Eggshell: I am Eggshell and you know, I just went to the store and bought a microphone. Nobody gave me permission. I just did it, and no one stopped me.

Toggle: I’m Toggle, and someone gave me this mic for free and said, “Go forth, sew chaos and do crimes,” and you’ve almost finished listening to Zooier Than Thou! Stay defiant, fellow zoos, and we’ll see you next time you feel like howling at the moon.

Both: Awoo!

Blind Date - Epilogue

Narrator: It’s wild to think that a whole year had gone by. The human parked her car and looked out at the ocean. It wasn’t quite the place they first met. It was a little farther down the coast. Away from curious looks and prying eyes. The human opened her trunk, pulling out a floating ring, as well as a platter of sushi. She heard an excited noise from the water, the dolphin was already here. She quickly pulled off her outer clothes, already wearing a bathing suit, and then after a brief pause to blow up the floatie, she headed down the rocky shore to the ocean. He is already waiting for her, swimming in circles, keeping one eye on her as she gets closer and closer. The human throws the inflatable ring, before getting on top of it, and then grabbing the sushi platter and kicking away from the land.

Sam: Hey there. I missed you too.

Narrator: The dolphin swims up to her, rubbing his head against her hand, before eyeing the sushi excitedly.

Sam: Hungry, huh? Salmon sashimi, your favorite.

Narrator: The human uses her chopsticks and picks up a piece of sashimi, bringing it to the dolphin, who opens his mouth and takes it gently from her. Then she grabs a roll for herself.

Sam: I guess we might not be all that different after all…