“Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.” – Douglas Adam
“Dolphins, along with whales and porpoises, are descendants of terrestrial mammals, most likely of the Artiodactyl order. The ancestors of the modern day dolphins entered the water roughly fifty million years ago, in the Eocene epoch.” - Wikipedia
A lot of times we’ve heard about dolphins saving the life of a human. Defending them from sharks or rescuing them from drowning.
When I came across THE COVE, a friend of mine told me this story:
Her and her husband own a boat and when they went out to sail along the island they took a couple with them, which had a baby of 7 months. They’d stopped in a bay, where there was suddenly a pot of dolphins coming along, surrounding the boat and playing in the water.
The mother of the baby sat down onto the rail of the boat and held the baby closer to the water, trying to show the baby what dolphins were like.
One of the dolphins disappeared and moments later it reappeared again…a little baby dolphin next to it.
And there they sat, a human with its human baby and a dolphin mother with his little one.
The movie reminded me of it, for it makes quite clear what it means to be a human or a fish. What it means to be strong or weak.
What it actually means to believe in something and fighting for it without knowing about the outcome.
Critics of this movie went mostly against the art of movie making. They say its been overdoing things, turning it into a James-Bond-007-Mission, hahah, and I have to admit that this might carry some truth.
Most of the time I sat upright, staring at the screen and pacing along a dark tunnel with the crew, chased by policemen with a 140 beat of heart rate.
Its professional set up, and yeah, it is tense and exciting as in 007 but zooming back to reality I have to say: “Of course it is real!”
I mean, who would sneak up at night time into forbidden areas where when get caught 28 days of jail expect you for sure?!
And so it is reality, too, that they had to watch humans committing crimes, they had to stand humiliations and they had to feel the most powerlessness they might have ever felt in their lives.
On the other hand, with wonderful pictures they show the contrast and the difference in the way we see things, and when I saw a dolphin playing with a self-made air bubble, I thought that there must be something wrong in the whole entire world!
I, for myself, haven’t seen a touching movie like this for ages, and I think it is worth watching it for each one of you out there.
Not only because it is about a creature we all know, but because its is about grief, faith, hope and mostly of it: PRIDE.
And speaking of which another important issue just crossed my mind.
Are we actually allowed to differ between animals?
Is every animal of the same value or are humans (thinking of us as the “survival-of-the-fittest”) allowed to scale, judge and decide which animal has the right to live and which could be killed?
Is it pride as well, that makes us rather look at overseas and not on our lunch plates at home?
