oh, that was a very different thing. in fact, i think it’s a shame that public reaction to that situation killed dolphin research.

there’s a really really good episode of radiolab on this. the experiment was actually extremely promising and groundbreaking. they had a dolphin spending its own free time practicing making human words with his blowhole, using the water to try and make a sort of lip. rotating the blowhole in and out of the water to shape the sounds. this dolphin was able to understand spoken language and was observably getting frustrated at his inability to say what he clearly wanted to.

the dolphin jerking thing happened because this was a dolphin actively in the throws of puberty. dolphins are intelligent, willful, occasionally evil animals. in nature they will masturbate themselves on shellfish and so other heinous sexually deviant things by human standards. the dolphin in the study was showing tremendous progress, but started showing string sexual urges. it got to the point that he was completely uncooperative. they jerked him off because he was cooperative after. there is no reason to believe the dolphin was explicitly attracted to the researcher and the researcher was said that she wasn’t attracted to the dolphin.

this story was highly sensationalized. so much so that it completely overshadowed the fact that THE DOLPHIN COULD TALK. he wasn’t very good at it, but that’s only because he lacked the hardware. to this day no one can get funding for dolphin research because of this. it left that much of a stink on the entire field. we have made almost no meaningful progress in this field since. THE DOLPHIN COULD FUCKING TALK AND ALL WE CARE ABOUT IS HOW GROSS IT IS THAT THEY JERKED IT OFF.