Friends

Waikoloa, HI (Oct 30, 2005)

Free! This has been an intense week. The conference was interesting, but with so many people to meet with, and so many talks to attend (every day from 8:00AM to 5:30PM, with some night sessions and work dinners), it was certainly not relaxing. Still, it is a change in the routine, and these meetings are very useful to “brush antennas”, like little ants reinforcing the bonds within the ant farm. Even in the age of email and low cost long distance communications, person to person contact cannot be substituted. On the other end, coming all the way to Hawaii to spend a week in a dark cold room is quite a torture, and I am happy to be done with it. Mayli arrived yesterday night, and we will now spend a week of vacation in a coffee farm south of Kona, on the Big Island.

The conference was in a big resort north of Kailua, one of these places where people go to spend their vacations doing aerobics in the swimming pools, or shopping in the luxury stores in the resort. The place was so big that there was a train to go from one building to the other. The rooms were very expensive for a scientific conference, but apparently we payed them VERY cheap as the normal rate was still 4 times larger. I don’t think I would have resisted one more day in this artificial setting, but I guess it was good to do the experience just once, to know how it is, given that this is something I would never be able to afford, even if I would.

This leads me to the photo. The highlight of the resort was their “Dolphin Experience”. The resort has six bottlenose dolphins, that are kept in a saltwater artificial (and closed) lagoon within the property. A friend of mine called it the “dolphin prison”. For a modicum price of a couple hundred dollars (with reservations months in advance) one can have an interactive experience with these dolphins. You are allowed into the lagoon, where the dolphin instructors let you touch and swim with them. Yesterday, before leaving the resort, we had the chance of seeing how this “dolphin experience” is made, while some hotel guests were doing it. It left me with a mixed taste in my mouth. I didn’t like the way the whole event was spectacularized. For the whole time there was a cameramen filming the scene. Then they took closeup pictures of a kid “kissing” a dolphin, and made the dolphins make some “tricks”. On the other end, the dolphins didn’t seem to mind being at the center of the spotlight, and interacting with the people in the lagoon. They were probably been born in captivity, and they seemed to ask for human interaction on their own will. The photo shows a moment in which one of the instructors was resting on a pier. She whistled an ultrasonic whistle and a dolphin came and started to look at her until she lowered down to pet him. The scene repeated over and over with the dolphins coming out of the water when they wanted some attention. In many occasions they didn’t seem to act differently than a dog.

So, I don’t know. Maybe some of you have some experience about similar situations: are we exploiting these dolphins, and traumatizing them by keeping them in captivity, or this is acceptable as they don’t seem to suffer from the experience?