Mar 13, 2008

Dolphin Therapy Smells Fishy

Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience Bad Medicine Columnist
Yahoo News 12 Mar 08;

full article on the wildsingapore news blog

Here's some extracts ...

For some physically and mentally handicapped children, swimming with dolphins is a dream come true. That dream is shared by a multi-million dollar industry that provides so-called dolphin-assisted therapy for a few thousand dollars per session.

For the dolphins, the interactions with humans tend to be a nightmare.

Yet while laboratory animal are at least poked and prodded for some good for humankind, interacting with dolphins provides no long-term human health benefits and is largely an unproven therapy that can cheat patients out of real treatment, according to two recent studies.

...

It may be that we are merely charmed by the dolphin's Joker-like smile, which of course isn't a smile but rather the natural shape of its mouth that fools us into thinking they like us.

Links

Dolphin Exporter Wants To Export Live Dolphins to Singapore

Pacific Magazine 18 Feb 08;

SUFFERING, NOT SMILING: The Truth About Captive Dolphins
on the Acres website

Follow Thai government's lead - release dolphins at Sentosa back into the wild
Letter from Acres, Straits Times Forum Online 25 Feb 06

Boycott the dolphin parks
Jonathan Owen, The Independent 2 Jul 06

How are dolphins captured?
Captured Dolphin With Four Fins Spotlights Controversial Hunt

John Roach, National Geographic News 14 Nov 06

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A dolphin is a sea creature that has always fascinated human beings; for some reason we see them, in terms of the animal kingdom, as a superior animal, with a superior intelligence. Many studies had analyzed the structure of the dolphin’s brain and had found that in fact, a dolphin brain is actually a better organized one than that of the human, and possibly one step beyond human evolution. There is this cortex that we haven’t developed yet and scientists don’t know whats the function of it!, They even have the same amount of cromosomes!.... watch a very interesting interview that I found about it here