Dolphins, Harry Recher and Porpoise Behaviour.

Abstract

MY task was to understand dolphins on an evening when I was too tired and wanted to go to bed. Instead I headed into Google Scholar and found plenty to read on dolphins––all of it pushing me closer to sleep. However, after watching the documentary “The Cove”, which is about dolphin butchering in a sleepy Japanese village and with two papers on newly understood dolphin distributions ready for this issue of Pacific Conservation Biology, I pushed ahead to write an editorial (or vignette) on dolphins and this took precedence over my desire to sleep. Not having studied dolphins in any detail does not seem to place me in a sound position to write about them. Yet perhaps I can turn this lack of involvement with dolphin work to my advantage. This distance helps make me impartial to the polarized debate on the consuming passions of eating dolphins. In short, I had the awesome power of ignorance.