Flipper

24 May 2017

Heather managed to squeeze one more thing into our anniversary, a visit to the Dolphin Research Center down the road. She had been thinking about it for a while, but was concerned about supporting an organization that wasn't treating the animals well.

They seemed to be on the up and up now, although they were pretty typical for their time back in the 50s. The animals are rescue animals or descendants of captured dolphins. The pen fences are laughably low, and are open to Florida Bay. They can jump the fences if they choose, and in fact when a major storm is imminent they are released, but return themselves. Other dolphins from the wild apparently come up to the pens to chat.

The animals participate at their discretion, as we observed when we were there.

They also had sea lions.

Heather ended up doing one of the dolphin interaction sessions, which were for as many as four people in a group. Since she was the only one signed up for that session, she got to do all the activities herself.

Interestingly, one of the things the trainers are working on are higher level commands. Instead of "do this" with a set response, the dolphins are learning more vague commands, like "that thing you just did, do it again".

It was a nice, small facility where you could see most everything that was going on in multiple shows and training sessions at the same time. Or just sit in the shade and watch the animals on a nice day.

sv-hiatus.blogspot.com