Swimming isn’t enough
Oh but, Christie Wilcox at Discover reports that the dolphin-assisted birth didn’t happen.
According to the documentary, Dorina did not go through with her watery plans. She went into labor at night, and thus had a natural birth on land. But, she did say she could feel the dolphins ‘sending positive energy’.
Below is my original commentary on the practice of dolphin-assisted births, from 2013. But the tl;dr version: Dolphins are wild animals. Wild animals do not make good midwives.
Because wild animals can get bitey and tossy and killy.
But there’s another quite compelling reason, which is that they’re not trained. Midwifery isn’t just hanging around sympathetically you know – midwives have to do things. Swimming isn’t enough.
Because of their friendly disposition and common occurance in aquariums, we tend to think of dolphins as trustworthy, loving creatures. But let’s get real for a minute here. Dolphins don’t eat sunshine and fart roses. They’re wild animals, and they are known to do some pretty terrible things.
Look at how their treat their women. Male dolphins are aggressive, horny devils. Males will kidnap and gang-rape females with their prehensile penises, using alliances of several males to keep females isolated from the rest of the group. As Miriam Goldstein once explained to Slate, “To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails. And if she tries to swim away, they chase her down.” Male dolphins don’t just rape their females — they’ve also been known to assert authority by forcibly mounting other males.
They also get a kick out of beating on and killing other animals. Dolphins will toss, beat, and kill small porpoises or baby sharks for no apparent reason other than they enjoy it, though some have suggested the poor porpoises serve as practice for killing the infants of rival males. That’s right, not only do dolphins kill other animals, they kill baby dolphins using the same brutal tactics. No matter how cute they might appear, dolphins are not cuddly companions; they are real, large, ocean predators with a track record for violence — even when it comes to humans.
See? I told you they get tossy. Imagine the fun they would have with a newborn infant.
Apparently that mother human was not sufficiently committed to the dolphin midwives or she’d have made a back-up plan for a night birth. . .
Rape, murder, torturing other creatures and our own young for sport: all of these are behaviors also observed in every human society ever. Given that we leave infants around other humans, maybe leaving them around dolphins isn’t that much more ridiculous.
Though it’s a fair point that no dolphins are trained in how to care human infants, while some humans are.