Every now and then the world of journalism offers us diamond hidden amongst the rough of political articles and local police reports. Today I found one such article, thanks to the science reporting department at a certain search engine. I sort of feel bad for the people who have to post these articles. They probably wish they were dealing with real science or real journalism or both, depending on their degrees.
Anyway, this golden article describes why playing with dolphins is not a valid mental health treatment. Thankfully, the writer of the article has enough common sense to tell us that dolphin-assisted therapy was a joke of a treatment from day one, and if this country was full of sensible people, this article wouldn't even need to be written. So it's a fun read.
What shocks me most of all is that playing with dolphins has been used for illnesses as serious as autism for over 30 years! Did it really take everyone 30 years to realize that dolphins don't cure autism? More importantly, at least part of the legitimate scientific community took this business seriously for that long? In case you're willing to forgive those scientists their ignorance, I should tell you that this technique was founded by someone who took a lot of LSD and then claimed he could communicate with dolphins and aliens. So it had a really credible background.
The highlight of the whole thing, though, is this comment at the end of the article: "It may be that we are merely charmed by the dolphin's Joker-like smile, which of course isn't a smile but rather the natural shape of its mouth that fools us into thinking they like us." If only they had dolphin-insight like this 30 years ago so I wouldn't have to waste your time with this blog post.
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