Blackfish - encore presentations tonight and tomorrow on CNN!

If you missed watching or recording Blackfish on Thursday, you have more chances to see it. There will be encore showings tonight (Saturday, October 26) at 7 ET and tomorrow night(Sunday, October 27) at 9 ET.

The film won its cable news timeslot on Thursday and has sparked an outcry across Twitter and the internet.

Blackfish to air on CNN this Thursday, October 24th!

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s acclaimed and influential documentary Blackfish, which I’ve discussed here recently, will be airing on CNN tomorrow (Thursday) night at 9 PM Eastern time.

By all means, tune in and/or set your system to record it.

The Alaskan Collie Fluffyterrier

I was delighted to read this story last month about Costa Rica’s plan to close its zoos. Since I was lazy posting about it and then Mano Singham scooped me :), I decided to wait* for an occasion to include it with some related news.

That occasion has already arrived, with this charming story about a Costa Rican dog shelter:



***UPDATE: THE CUTE!!!***

*In the meantime, I also came across a response to one of Singham’s questions:

I do not like zoos or circuses for many reasons but one is the way that animals are kept in captivity. At least with some of the better public zoos where the animals are given lots of room and are treated well, some sort of case can be made for their existence, that they increase awareness in the public of the need to preserve wildlife and their habitats. I do not know though if a causal relationship has been established between visiting zoos and increased support for wildlife .

I mentioned Lori Marino in a recent post, and while getting a link to some more information about her work I noticed a link to her critique of a study about the educational and conservation value of zoos and aquaria. (There’s a link to the full text on the page at the red “This is to announce a new publication in Society & Animals.”)What I love about it is that she rigorously picks apart the methodology of this research exactly as she did the methods of woo/PR studies about “Dolphin-Assisted Therapy.” These critical pieces would be useful for teaching about research methods in the social sciences.

(Of course, even if zoos did serve an educational/conservation purpose, this wouldn’t necessarily be sufficient justification for treating other animals in this way. Nor would it necessarily mean that better alternatives don’t exist.)

Blackfish: Love, oppression, and science

I’ve made no secret of my thoughts about SeaWorld and other marine parks, and was happy a couple of months ago to learn of a new documentary, Blackfish, about the experiences of orcas and human trainers and their interactions at SeaWorld. I saw it recently, and was impressed. Via Ecorazzi, a few clips:







The movie is kind of a chronicle of a death foretold, focusing on the history of encounters between human workers and orcas at SeaWorld to help the audience better comprehend the fatal attack on trainer Dawn Brancheau by the orca Tilikum at SeaWorld Orlando in 2010.

It’s the focus on this one whale and on the experiences of the human workers, many of whom worked closely with Tilikum, that gives the film much of its power. The movie shows the workers' initial enthusiasm and increasing disillusionment as they came to appreciate the whales’ reality. Their stories are relatable: countless young people who love animals and the ocean visit these theme parks and dream of becoming “trainers.” (Many imagine that the position requires a high level of education about the animals rather than, as it turns out, attractiveness, athleticism, and performance abilities.)

The former trainers interviewed are thoughtful and compassionate to a one, impossible to dismiss as disgruntled former employees. They went into the work with an image of themselves, an image encouraged by SeaWorld, as “partners” with and caretakers of the orcas. As they came to recognize the real physical and psychological condition of the orcas and their own role in perpetuating the animals’ oppression and distress, intense embarrassment and guilt set in. This is really a tale of scientific awakening, even though it doesn’t superficially look to be about science. It’s a story of their growing recognition that their understanding of reality had been limited and highly distorted by the situation.

This failure to understand was direct. As one of the former “trainers” describes, she had believed when she worked at SeaWorld that she was knowledgeable about orcas, but over time came to realize that she actually knew very little about them. The workers came to recognize the partiality and inaccuracy of the information about the whales (such as about their typical life span in the wild vs. in captivity) that they were being fed by the company and then passing on to the public.¹

But the nature of the relationship between humans – all humans - and orcas at SeaWorld interferes with understanding in much more fundamental ways. That former trainer’s comment about the false sense of knowledge reminded me of Erich Fromm’s discussion of the nature of love, which I’ve argued is inseparable from an understanding of science.

As I’ve discussed, Fromm argued that love was characterized by care (“the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love”), responsibility (“my response to the needs, expressed and unexpressed, of another human being”), respect (“the ability to see a person as he is”), and knowledge. Fromm emphasizes the incompatibility of love with relations of domination and exploitation. These relations, which encourage narcissistic distortions, aren’t conducive to respect or to the development of objective knowledge about others. He argues for the importance of combating narcissism in forming knowledge: “I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person’s reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.” (111-12)

Fromm expands on this argument in Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud



in which he makes a case for the essential “connection between ‘thought’ and ‘concern’,” the “interrelation between concern and knowledge.” He contends that, in the human sciences at least, the advance of knowledge depends on caring for, being engaged with and sympathetic to, those we’re studying. He explains:

Both psychology and sociology have as their object man. I can get to know a great deal about man by observing him like any other object. I – the observer – stand against my ‘ob-ject’ (‘ob-ject’ and ‘objection’ have the same root; in German, Gegenstand=‘counterstand’) to observe it, describe it, measure it, weigh it – yet I do not understand that which is alive if it remains an ‘object’. I understand man only in the situation of being related to him, when he ceases to be a split-off object and becomes part of me or, to be still more correct, when he becomes ‘me’, yet remains also ‘not-me’. If I remain a distant observer I see only manifest behavior, and if this is all I want to know, I can be satisfied with being an observer. But in this position the whole of the other person, his full reality, escapes me.

The sort of concern needed for science requires a recognition of shared experience:

I need to be myself in order to see the other. How could I understand his fear, his sadness, his aloneness, his hope. His love – unless I felt my own fear, sadness, aloneness, hope, or love? If I cannot mobilize my own human experience, mobilize it and engage myself with my fellow man, I might come to know a great deal about him, but I shall never know him.

The most promising approach to knowledge of human beings is the most caring - concerned, “therapeutically oriented knowledge” inspired by questions like “how can man be free, how can he be fully human [sic], how can he become what he could be?” Fromm offers the paradigmatic example of medicine: “How many medical discoveries,” he asks, “would have been made without the wish to heal?”

He insists on the importance of this active concern to fruitful discovery. “[R]andom and uninterested observation,” in contrast, “rarely leads to significant knowledge.” Countering the common argument that an active interest and concern interfere with objectivity, he contends that “[t]his interest, far from being opposed to knowledge, is its very condition, provided it is blended with reason, that is, with the capacity to see things as they are, ‘to let them be’.”²

So, in Fromm’s view, not only is objective knowledge an essential element of love, but the reverse is true. In fact, the two are inseparable. The foundation of good science is not cold detachment but an approach guided by care, concern, responsibility, and a therapeutic intent. Rather than a futile attempt to transcend or achieve distance from the objects of study, Fromm advises cultivating respect: attempting to overcome the narcissistic inclination to view others through the lens of our perceived interests in order to see them (and by extension ourselves) as they/we really are. Although Fromm is talking about relations among humans and the human sciences, his insights can be, and need to be, expanded to include our relationships with and attempts to understand other animals as well.

Considered from this perspective, the various ways in which relations and systems of oppression obstruct the advance of science become more apparent. Everything in these systems militates against the respect and active concern necessary to objectivity and the formation of real knowledge. Theme parks like SeaWorld are a good example. Billed as sites where humans can encounter and learn about orcas, in fact they’re a microcosm of the system of domination and exploitation in which they operate. This makes them useful in illustrating the sorts of epistemic distortions that all such systems necessarily produce.

Our role in orcas' exploitation, for example, encourages a sort of active indifference to rather than an active interest in their experience. It leads people to block out consideration of the orcas’ real subjective experiences and psychological states. This includes a reluctance to investigate their psychological-emotional capacities, both those we share and those we might not.³ It also encourages apathy toward their interests and needs, both species-specific and individual.

We don’t want to look behind the stage set, or learn the truth about how the whales came to be performing in the parks. In fact, we shrink from recognizing the artificiality of the orcas’ treatment in the parks and its stark contrast with their lives in the wild. This motivated inattention shades into active denial. We’re inclined to believe the stories told by the corporation about the whales’ experiences and motivations, and even to embellish them with our own details. We eagerly accept assertions of the orcas’ stimulus-response simplicity and cognitive limitations. Just as the effects of poverty on human children are often taken as evidence of their genetic limitations, the effects of the orcas’ conditions of deprivation and their responses to these conditions are viewed as evidence of their relatively simple animal brains.

The position in which these parks situate humans in relation to the orcas - as accessories to their oppression and exploitation - leads to the muting of empathy. Rather than marshalling our own emotional experience to try to appreciate theirs, we actively deny that orcas have emotional capacities that conflict with the role they’ve been forced into. We convince ourselves that they enjoy the performances and their lives at the park.⁴ At least, we’re easily led to believe, they don’t mind their situation; in some sense, maybe they’ve even chosen it. We’re motivated to regard anything short of open distress or rebellion as cheerful acquiescence and cooperation.

When we encounter evidence of physical harm, we’re inclined to look away and to accept the explanations offered – the photos and videos don’t show what they purport to show, the injuries are superficial, orcas harming other orcas are engaging in natural behaviors, and so on. When we’re confronted with evidence of distress, we tend to deprive it of meaning or reframe it in ways that make it more palatable. We display a similar willful cluelessness toward acts of rebellion or resistance, including displays of aggression toward or attacks on humans. We tend to accept the explanations offered: these incidents were due to human mistakes, the whales were playing and didn’t understand what they were doing,…

The system leads to a similar distortion of our self-image, in which our role in the orcas’ oppression and exploitation is hidden or disguised as beneficial. While adopting more or less unconsciously the corporate perspective, which sees the orcas as objects valued for their usefulness, we like to see ourselves as part of a system of protection and caretaking centered in the parks. Rather than appreciating the epistemic and psychological distortions caused by our role in the system of oppression and exploitation, we actually believe we’re being enriched and educated while contributing to the well-being of orcas.

The marine park experience is very distant from Fromm’s therapeutic approach, which would try to understand the whales in terms of their real needs and capacities and promote conditions in which these are fulfilled. In fact, the system feeds narcissism and objectification, which are contrary to scientific understanding. As the film argues, if our understanding of the orcas’ reality weren’t thwarted by our position in a system of oppression and exploitation, we would have predicted the violence we’ve seen.

The awakening of the SeaWorld workers is instructive. In a sense, they were pulled toward both extremes, the system-serving and the scientific. On the one hand, their position in the system and their need to go on with their work and feel good about what they were doing virtually required the epistemic contortions described above – willful ignorance, denial, system-serving interpretation, accepting comforting myths, and so on. Despite their years of working closely with the orcas, the oppressive system in which they worked required bad faith. By way of contrast, scientists like Ingrid Visser and Lori Marino, also interviewed for the film, work in conditions that facilitate knowledge rather than systemically distorting and obstructing understanding.

On the other hand, the trainers’ proximity to the whales combined with the genuine love for the animals enabled them to see behind the veil – to witness firsthand the real conditions of the orcas' lives and their distress. Even though most seem to have had limited knowledge at the time of the orcas’ lives in the wild and their real capacities and abilities, the beliefs they were encouraged to hold due to their role in the system became increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of the evidence. They moved in several stages away from the systemic perspective and toward Fromm’s respectful, therapeutic orientation: from seeing themselves as the whales’ “partners” in a beneficent system, to understanding their role as that of the orcas’ protectors within and in some sense from the system, to realizing that the system itself is rotten and advocating for its end. Their descriptions of moments in this transformation are poignant: one interviewee describes being ridiculed by other workers for expressing her own pain at witnessing the suffering of orcas being separated from their families, while another explains how he remained at his job for a while to protect “Tilly.” More thoughts from a former trainer interviewed for the film:



The trainers’ experiences illustrate how easy it is to distort our understanding when we’re in oppressive and unequal systems that require a distorted understanding. But they also point the way forward. Examining how these theme parks interfere with the formation of knowledge of reality – of other animals and of ourselves - provides an opportunity to look critically at how our positions within systems of oppression and exploitation, including our seemingly innocent roles as tourists and visitors, work against not just the wellbeing of those most oppressed by those systems (and of the oppressors as well) but against understanding, against knowledge, and to find ways to move in a new direction.

¹ The film shows a current employee being asked a question about how long the orcas generally live in the wild and giving the canned, incorrect corporate response. In an earlier post, I discussed Susan G. Davis’ work describing the problems with SeaWorld’s so-called educational programs, including the downplaying of evolution in order to cater to creationists.

² As the quotation that opens one of my recent posts describes, this orientation is the foundation of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, to which Fromm was (uneasily) linked, and really of all critical social science.

³ Some of the experts interviewed for the film discuss orcas’ lifelong close family relationships and speculate that these patterns might have led to emotions and emotional bonds that we don’t experience. It’s hard for humans, accustomed as we are to seeing other animals as precursors to or lesser, incomplete versions of ourselves, to even conceive of other animals having cognitive or emotional capacities that we don’t. The systems of oppression in which we typically meet make it even less likely that this recognition will emerge.

⁴ We fail even to consider that the orcas might be performing emotional labor, encouraged, as we are when faced with human emotional labor, to take expressions of emotion at face value.

Habeas Porpoise? Really?

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I love it.

Arie Trouwborst, Richard Caddell, and Ed Couzens, whose article about the orca Morgan in Transnational Environmental Law I mentioned previously, have a follow-up post at the Cambridge journals blog.

The Amsterdam District Court reviewed the previous decision, yet after consideration upheld the finding that Morgan’s transfer was legitimate. We consider this verdict to be demonstrably legally flawed. The Court based its determination primarily on a surprising appraisal of the ASCOBANS text, finding that a removal of an orca for rehabilitation purposes did not constitute “intentional taking” (such taking being precluded under the treaty). Moreover, the Court considered that enduring captivity was justified by the need to conduct research pursuant to obligations under ASCOBANS. This is deeply perplexing, since ASCOBANS does not consider permanent captivity for research (or any other) purposes acceptable. The judgment remains highly unsatisfactory in the light of these and other treaty obligations, while the Court seemingly ignored evidence that the facility to which the orca had been transferred does not engage in substantive research into cetacean ecology.

It must have been difficult for people to keep a straight face while arguing that Morgan’s captivity at Loro Parque was about research. It’s very obviously a theme park in which animals are exploited for human entertainment.

Shut it down.

Last month, protesters chanting “Shut it down!” managed to (peacefully) storm the gate at Marineland in Niagara Falls, Canada. (In developments today, it’s being reported that Marineland is threatening to sue a former trainer for more than $1 million over her statements to the Toronto Star about injuries to an orca named Kiska confined at the park.)

In related news, yesterday was an important court date in Amsterdam for the orca Morgan, when more arguments were to be brought and reports submitted in favor of getting her released from Loro Parque in the Canary Islands. You can read more here, here, and here. I haven't found any updates, but I'll post them when I do.

Death at SeaWorld: conflicted

In remarkably timely fashion, a new book by investigative journalist David Kirby, Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity,

will be released next week. I knew his name sounded familiar, and was quickly reminded why: his writing about vaccines. Damn.

This is a difficult case for me (as Kirby’s book on factory farming would have been had I known about it). It’s not as if he wrote one short, naïve article early on in the vaccine-autism manufactroversy. He wrote an entire book largely promoting antiscience, and then doubled down. Even years later he was still holding to this line (and possibly still is today). When it comes to any scientific question, It’s difficult to trust a person who could write “I believe that the public lynching and shaming of Dr. Wakefield is unwarranted and overwrought” in 2010.

This is a great demonstration of the problems woo creates. It’s astonishing that, with all of the real damage Pharma does to children around the world, some journalists are ignorant enough to latch onto antiscience causes like the antivaccine movement. This makes it all the more difficult for those of us fighting harmful corporate and government practices. I would say the same thing about people employing woo in the service of animal rights. But this case is maybe a bit more complicated: he’s written some nonsense on one subject, but for all I can tell this book is sound and well researched,* and other reliable sources have made and supported similar arguments. I remain undecided as to whether or not I’ll read this one, but I likely will. With extreme skepticism.

*Unfortunately, Kirby is already saying some silly things in interviews about the new book. “There’s a lot that SeaWorld could do to make my book less relevant,” he suggests, “- one estimate was that 70% of their revenues come from having Killer Whales. That’s billions of dollars, if they had taken that money and dedicated it to saving Whale habitat; well then having a few in captivity is what it takes. Maybe that’s what we would have to do to raise that kind of money to save the Whales in the wild, but of course they are not doing that.” Well, no, of course not. But even if they did, that’s not how ethics works. You don’t do that to some individual animals in the name of helping the species in the abstract. This is why the Declaration of Helsinki (gutted as it's been by pharmaceutical companies) exists.

SeaWorld, just fade into history, already.

It seems inevitable that someday future generations will look back on our treatment of nonhuman animals with the same moral disgust and incomprehension with which decent people today view the historical global institution of slavery or the current treatment of women in Islamic theocracies. I actively hope that day comes soon.

SeaWorld perfectly encapsulates the ideology of mastery and ownership. Thriving on exploitation and abuse, on suffering and death, it presents itself as a benevolent and “gentle patriarchy.” Last month, Florida judge Kenneth Welsch came down on the side of OSHA, deciding that humans could not work in close contact with orcas during SeaWorld performances. The ruling followed SeaWorld’s appeal of a decision by OSHA following the killing of “trainer” Dawn Brancheau by Tilikum in 2010. (Immediately, of course, SeaWorld’s CEO was out trying to spin and even possibly evade the spirit of the ruling.)

Writer Tim Zimmerman heard from a SeaWorld trainer shortly after the decision. Their email reads, in part,

I have known these abuses for years but to see it in affirmed in black and white was sickening. I’m a little ashamed that I allowed this company to take advantage of and abuse me (and the whales) for years because of my own selfishness to want these experiences.

I believe most of these workers, who’ve been exploited and endangered themselves, do genuinely care for the animals and want to see the work in a positive light. But the illusions and self-deception are increasingly difficult to sustain. It’s time for this sad chapter in our relationship with nonhuman animals to end.

Don't buy a ticket

Fidel at the Dolphinarium

I was struck by a passage in Jeffrey St. Clair’s introduction to Jason Hribal’s Fear of the Animal Planet in which he describes Cuba’s National Aquarium and its role in the dolphin trade. In my searches I found references to Castro’s visit last year, which also reminded me of an earlier post of mine.

Fidel at the Dolphinarium

Breathing the warm Havana air,
the recluse attends the spectacle.
Young ones perform late into the nights,
propelling the people up, noses under their feet.
Attacks are very very rare, the bosses tell him.
The beasts enjoy their work.
They greet him at the acrylic window
standing on their heads, smiling.
Guevara beams.
Working with women is good,
and much safer.

Fear of the Animal Planet, Jason Hribal

…Topsy had no choice but to continue to resist. Her final act was charging after a group of Italian construction workers. A week later, several ‘very matter-of-fact electricians from the Edison Company’ arrived at the park and began setting up for the execution...On the afternoon of January 4th, Mr. Edison’s executioners attached electrodes to the elephant’s feet. At 2:45 pm, they flipped the switch. ‘There was a bit of smoke for an instant’, a New York Times reporter noted. ‘Topsy raised her trunk as if to protest, then shook, bent to her knees, fell, and rolled over on her right side motionless’. Two minutes later, she was declared dead. (43)

This is a radical book. It should make most readers, if they can get past the fact that the cover quotation is from the president of PETA, see things in a radically new way. By no means is this to say it’s a perfect book. The criticisms in the Amazon ratings are largely accurate: It needed (much better) proofreading and editorial guidance. Far more importantly, neither the fascinating preface by Jeffrey St. Clair ("Let Us Now Praise Infamous Animals") about the history of animal court trials nor the text itself contains any footnotes at all. You could say that it’s a polemical work, a pamphlet of sorts, so strict academic standards don’t apply, but such a work is far more effective when well and carefully documented. Even the most skeletal standards of scholarship require quotations to be sourced. (Disappointingly, it doesn’t contain any photos, either.)

Nevertheless, Hribal’s sad account of animal resistance is compelling. It tells the stories of animals – elephants, primates, and sea mammals - and their acts of, I’m convinced, defiance and resistance. Its approach poses problems for those visions of animal welfare or cross-species understanding that present nonhuman animals as mute or passive objects. (It doesn’t seem strange to speak of these as patronizing after reading the book.) It speaks to epistemic injustice, especially in the all-too-brief sections on proposed explanations for the animals’ angry, willful, and often ingenious actions. It speaks to moral progress.

It’s a seditious history from below, in the spirit of the histories of oppressed human groups (really - read that link); indeed, Hribal often talks about the animals as workers and discusses their acts in the same terms as we talk about labor struggles. This is a key element: most of us can recognize individual animals’ acts against specific people as something more than instinctual, but this book leads us to consider them in terms of (sometimes effective) patterns of resistance to systemic violence and exploitation.

Some of the stories I’d heard on the news or read about, but seeing them from a vastly different perspective elicited a different emotional reaction. In some cases, I found myself cheering them on in their acts of escape, sabotage, and even violence.

Bad CAM research - Dolphin-Assisted Therapy

The latest issue of Phi Kappa Phi Forum, on the theme of empathy, has a rare (for them :)*) interesting piece by Lori Marino (I’m starting to think there might be something to this name-determination business…) - “Dolphin Assisted Therapy: From Ancient Myth to Modern Snake Oil.”** Marino is a cetacean researcher who's reviewed the history of DAT (“humans swimming and/or interacting with captive dolphins with the intent of treating some mental or physical disorder,” 5) and claims of its efficacy. She argues that not only have the benefits not been scientifically demonstrated but the therapy is harmful to both humans and dolphins.

DAT, according to Marino, grows out of ancient traditions of human reverence for and attachment to dolphins, leading more recently to dolphins’ status as a “New Age icon” (5). There are DAT facilities worldwide, and she says it continues to increase in popularity. DAT - difficult to separate from recreational “swimming with the dolphins” tourism and “not regulated by any authority overseeing health and safety standards for either humans or dolphins” (5) - is said to be effective in treating any number of ailments:

Autism and similar developmental disabilities top the list of conditions touted as highly treatable by DAT. Proponents also claim it helps everything from depression and anxiety to infections to neuromuscular disorders to cancer and AIDS…Proponents also assert that DAT provides humans with enhanced concentration (a vague claim unproven scientifically); alters people’s brainwaves therapeutically via the dolphin’s echolocation, the high-pitched sounds the dolphin makes (nothing but pseudoscience); and generally enhances biophilia (a feel-good, New Age love of nature) (5).

But according to Marino’s and others’ analyses over several years, there is no scientific basis for the claims of DAT proponents and practitioners. The most recent review she mentions is one of her own:

Marino, Lori, and Scott O. Lilienfeld. 2007. “Dolphin-Assisted Therapy: More Flawed Data and Flawed Conclusions.” Anthrozoös 20 (3): 239-49. [full-text PDF available here]

(I had to search for the paper myself because, that’s right, the Forum doesn’t have any citations! Believe it or not for a publication targeted to scholars, there are no footnotes, just a box at the bottom of a page in some articles instructing readers: “For footnotes, go online to www.phikappaphi.org/forum/spring2011.” So I did, and there aren’t even any citations or suggestions for further reading listed for this piece. This despite the fact that each article is accompanied by a long author biography and illustrated with large pictures - many not directly related to the contents - and those useless semi-abstract graphic things. The publication is of course ultimately at fault for the lack of proper citations, but I suspect they’re the more immediate problem as well, as I wouldn’t expect many authors to shy away from citing their own published work on a subject.)

The 2007 article reviews five peer-reviewed (how, I have no idea) DAT studies from the previous eight years, assessing the efficacy if DAT in: depression, anxiety, atopic dermatitis, “infantile neurosis,” autism, mental retardation, and general psychological well-being. As summarized in the abstract:

We found that all five studies were methodologically flawed and plagued by several threats to both internal and construct validity. We conclude that nearly a decade following our initial review, there remains no compelling evidence that DAT is a legitimate therapy or that it affords any more than fleeting improvements in mood (239).

It’s worthwhile to note that the five studied DAT in a range of conditions, so there really haven’t even been five peer-reviewed studies for any single condition over many years. Any claim of an intervention's efficacy in treating such diverse conditions should automatically be suspect. It’s also important to note that this is a therapeutic intervention whose alleged mechanism for bringing about significant and extended benefits in any of these conditions is, as is typical in this realm, not elaborated in any detail, and for some conditions exceedingly implausible. Wooish beliefs aside, it would be very surprising for people and dolphins – as opposed to people and dogs, for example – to have any special empathy or bond: dolphins are not domesticated and the two species haven’t had much enduring contact. And, as Marino and Lilienfeld describe, these studies are for the most part seriously weak. I’m interested in the specific issues involved, but the review article is worth discussing in a general way in that the problems Marino and Lilienfeld find in the DAT studies seem common to a good deal of CAM research, and shed light on what makes bad (and good!) research.

In brief, they found major problems with internal and construct validity in these studies. The studies lacked adequate controls, blinding, and follow-up assessments. It’s a short article and can be read at the link above, but I’ll reproduce their list of the areas in which the studies were severely flawed, from Table 1 (242), here (each of the studies had major problems in one or more of these areas):

Placebo Effects: Improvement from expectation of improvement

[People have expectations of efficacy based on marketing of DAT.]

Novelty Effects: Effects of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm not specific to the intended treatment

Construct Confounding: Failure to take into account the fact that the procedure may include more than one active ingredient

[People were outdoors, in water, interacting with “charismatic” animals, and receiving attention from professionals. There are many aspects of the interaction with the dolphins that would need to be distinguished from one another.]

Resentful Demoralization: Participants aware of not receiving the active treatment may be resentful and respond more negatively than the treatment group

Demand Characteristics: Tendency of participants to alter their responses in accord with their suspicions about the research hypothesis

Experimenter Expectancy Effects: Tendency for experimenter to unintentionally bias the results in accordance with the hypothesis

History: Occurrence of potentially therapeutic events other than the intended treatment during the course of the study

Testing: Improvements due to testing itself (e.g., practice effects)

Regression: Tendency of extreme scores to become less extreme on re-testing

Instrumentation: Changes in the dependent measure at different times in the study

Multiple Intervention Interference: Administration of treatments other than the intended treatment during the course of the study

Maturation: Changes over time due to natural developmental effects

Informant Bias: Tendency of informants to selectively recall improvement in accord with their hopes and expectations (retrospective bias) or unintentional distortion of improvement due to effort justification (“the psychological need to justify to oneself the time, expense, and energy invested in the treatment,” 244)

The authors contend that people should be informed of the lack of evidence for any beyond the most transitory effects so that they can make informed decisions (248). In the Forum piece, Marino responds to the question, “Who does it hurt?”:

Some might argue that DAT is not completely devoid of merit because, at the very least, children and adults enjoy interacting with dolphins in a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So, even if DAT provides no scientifically proven salutary benefits whatsoever, who could quarrel with putting a smile, at least temporarily, on the face of a sick child?

There is more to DAT than meets the eye and when one becomes aware of the tradeoffs, DAT no longer seems benign. The costs are enormous, for humans (except for the practitioners) and dolphins alike, in all sorts of ways (5).

Marino says that DAT, “[h]awked heavily” to parents of children with autism and other developmental disorders, provides false hope to vulnerable and desperate parents. In addition, it’s expensive – the standard fee, according to Marino, is $5-7000 for a few short sessions over several days and not covered by insurance (a good thing); and may take people’s attention and resources away from other, effective, forms of help. There’s also a real risk of injuries and infections from interacting with these wild animals.

For the dolphins, captivity and work, according to Marino, “causes debilitating stress, disease and mortality to both the wild-caught and captive-born” (6). Capturing dolphins in the wild (no longer allowed in the US but allowed elsewhere) leads to mass slaughters and the reduction of dolphin populations. Having described complex cetacean social relationships – this was extremely interesting and I would like to read the best work on it, but…no citations offered – she argues (6), “We do not need to attach supernatural qualities to them, for their actual nature is much richer and multidimensional than any human mythology can provide.” I’ll have more to say about this soon….

*This should not be taken as a dig at them specifically. I generally find the Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter boring as hell, too.

**Lori Marino. 2011. “Dolphin Assisted Therapy: From Ancient Myth to Modern Snake Oil.” Phi Kappa Phi Forum 91 (1: Spring): 4-6.