The Dolphin in the Mirror

June 20, 2011
Dolphins have long captivated mankind, and this wide-ranging account of the highly evolved species demonstrates the complexity of this relationshipâand the challenges of writing about our sentimental attachments to animals. Riess's is an enthusiastic if unwieldy project, a hodgepodge of personal memoir, tutorial on captive dolphin behavior, and advocacy for halting large-scale dolphin hunts in Taiji, Japan. While Reiss, director of dolphin research at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, offers lengthy descriptions of her initial studies, she also notes that some of her approach and affinity for her subjects "really came from the gut, my intuition." That doesn't mean she doesn't achieve some groundbreaking insights. Her strengths are clearly in her research rather than her writing. She demonstrates, for instance, that dolphins are self-aware, a quality thought only to exist in the higher primates, though her nonscientific explanation doesn't measure up to her abilities to convey its import ("we felt that our work was a really big breakthrough") and she expresses her attachment to dolphins with the sincere but pedestrian "I am the luckiest person in the world!" Her enthusiasm is contagious, but hinders her from achieving her stated aim: a change in consciousness about ourselves and other animals, not in a fuzzy New Age way but in a way based on science."