Swimming With the Dolphins: Is It Love or Exploitation?
How did I spend my winter vacation? I went with my husband to Roatan, a reef-ringed tropical island off the north coast of Honduras, where we spent a lot of time sitting in the yard of our rented beach shack watching perversion in action.
I tried to ignore it, pretending it didn’t exist. But I couldn’t help observing again and again how groups of tourists were dropped into a roped-off pen where they could “swim” with dolphins. Even though this attraction is called “the ultimate dolphin encounter,” the reality is that the tourists wade with dolphins in waist-deep water. The dolphins, 19 altogether, belong to Anthony’s Key Resort and are a major tourist attraction. The dolphin lovers come by land and by sea, by the busload and by boat. The resort’s dolphin program calls itself the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences.
Like other facilities where dolphins are kept in captivity, this resort plays the science card to give a lucrative business the veneer of scientific legitimacy. “Ongoing behavioral studies and medical morphometric data has been collected since the facility opened” in 1989, according to the institute’s website. Marine scientist Dr. Naomi Rose, an activist against keeping whales and dolphins in captivity, summarized this prevalent scientific cover story: “About the only thing we have learned from research of captive cetaceans is that they shouldn’t be in captivity.”