Margaret Howe Lovatt was an animal researcher caught up in the weirdness of the 1960’s.
The weirdness we speak of is the Nasa-funded experiment on the U.S. Virgin Islands where Margaret tried to teach a dolphin named Peter to speak English.
Margaret lived with Peter the dolphin in a normal, domestic home… that just happened to be filled with knee-deep water!
She and Peter lived together and their friendship pretty quickly blossomed into something more… gross physical.
Margaret said:
“Peter liked to be… with me. He would rub himself on my knee, my foot or my hand and I allowed that. I wasn’t uncomfortable – as long as it wasn’t too rough. In the beginning I would put him on the elevator and say you go play with the girls for a day. [Eventually] it was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen, it was very precious and very gentle, Peter was right there, he knew that I was right there.”
That’s right. She used to whack off a dolphin.
It actually became a regular part of the study. Margaret continued:
“It was sexual on his part – it was not sexual on mine, sensuous perhaps. It would just become part of what was going on like an itch, just get rid of that we’ll scratch and we would be done and move on. I was there to get to know Peter, that was part of Peter.”
Well, we guess you put a male and a female together in a home, eventually they might start getting frisky.
We just didn’t expect it’d happen between two members of different species!!
So, was that dolphin abuse? Or just a little interspecies experimentation?
All we know is, that’s gross and we’re glad there are several decades sitting between us and that weird (s)experiment.
[Image via BBC/YouTube.]
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