I care deeply about the ocean, its wellbeing, and that of the creatures living in it. Having spent more than seven years of my life as a sailor at sea, I feel strongly about the need for healthy oceans. But I am no environmentalist. I am not an expert on marine life or ocean systems. This is why I decided to listen to Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins by Susan Casey. I was hoping I could learn a little bit more – I definitely did.

Casey opens the book with a story of swimming alone at night in a Hawaiian bay. A pod of dolphins join her, and she has an existential experience that leads her to research, study, and almost obsess over their world. Casey plunges head first into the world of dolphins and how humans interact with them. While she tries to avoid “falling down the rabbit hole, a place you can easily go with dolphins…[her] most enduring impression was how other-worldly the animals were.” Through most of the book, she is rather one-sided, coming down on the side of the dolphins and chastising mankind for mistreating them. But along the way, she definitely provides a plethora of evidence that they are highly evolved and extremely intelligent

For example, Casey visits a slew of marine parks similar to Seaworld and vividly describes how they both deceive the public by stating that dolphins (and their cousins, Orcas) enjoy being in captivity and how they mistreat the animals. She compares their containment in large pools to prison, and explains how the animals typically perform “a sequence of tricks – none of which [seem] to engage them even slightly, and all of which [seem], if you think about it, depressingly dumb.” She highlights numerous accidents that have taken place at parks, including the history of Tilikum, an Orca that has killed three people during his 33 years in captivity and was the subject of the documentary Blackfish (while there has never been a documented case of an Orca killing a person in the wild).

Casey spends a fair portion of the book visiting with environmentalists and scientists who are both studying and trying to help dolphins, and are proving just how smart these animals are. She reviews experiments which show that dolphins, unlike most animals in nature, can recognize themselves in a mirror and conceive of their own identity. She shows that they can identify their own body parts; realize TV is a representation of reality; remember a variety of movements, people, and ideas; and masterfully mimic their trainers. She also excoriates scientists such as John Lilly, who experimented with LSD, dolphins, and “interspecies mating.” But at the same time, she visits new age communities and gives credibility to their beliefs that “dolphins are not mere animals; they are beings from another dimension. Visitors from far away stars. Wise elders here to teach us vital lessons.” The communities seem to “see these animals not as a scientific challenge…but as one great big existential riddle.”

The book’s lack of objectivity is later exemplified when she severely criticizes the US Navy. She provides documentation and evidence that shows that mid and low frequency sonar, used by the Navy to detect enemy vessels underwater, damages underwater life and may be leading to mass strandings of dolphins and whales. But she absolutely seems to give more credence to the hippies who believe dolphins are from outer space and literally pray to these animals than to the US Navy and their bureaucratic processes and explanations. As someone who has experienced bureaucracy, and knows it is not all bad, and has worked alongside the Navy, this is frustrating. At the same time, her evidence of the damage undersea noise can wreck upon dolphins is fairly strong.

While I was listening to this book, I felt like Casey did get sucked down the rabbit hole she was trying to avoid. The book could have been strengthened with a little more perspective, questioning the movements that see dolphins as gods and spirit guides a little more and giving some sense of fairness to the government. But in the end, she realizes that “despite the vast difference between our two species, possibly the most startling thing about dolphins is how inexplicably they resemble us.”  This made me want to go swim with dolphins – but only in the ocean. I probably won’t be visiting a marine park anytime soon. Score: 6.5.

Side Note: This dolphin video is awesome. So is this one.  They are basically just like cat videos.