Friday, July 15, 2011

"Flippin' Evil!"



Dolphins have had a lot of good press. They’re cute, loveable and smart, with complex modes of communication and tightly-knit family units. They’re sleek, playful and human-friendly, and have been known to save people from sharks. They have big brains and large, intelligent eyes. The U.S. Navy train them for complex and often dangerous underwater tasks, such as laying tracking devises and defusing mines. Whenever a dolphin becomes entangled in a driftnet there are howls of outrage.

As far back as the sixties the appeal of the dolphin was being exploited in TV shows like Flipper. Flipper was a kind of aquatic Lassie who effortlessly breezed through a heroic checklist of brave deeds – thwarting villains and greedy property developers and saving children from calamity. At the end of the show everyone always laughed at Flipper’s loveable hi-jinx. Other televised animals such as Gentle Ben, Rin Tin Tin, Mr Ed and Skippy were way down the food chain compared to this fun loving fish.

More recently, tourist meccas have taken to adopting the dolphin as their symbol. Whereas you’ll never see a Cane Toad being flaunted as, say, Townsville’s civic emblem, in Byron Bay the Dolphin is rife. Every hotel, motel, butcher-shop, New-Age Mart, golf club, bowling club, RSL, petrol station and newspaper ad features a dolphin prominently plastered somewhere. This is ironic given that Byron Bay used to be a whaling town.

The community in general has taken the dolphin to its heart. Ask any kid what’s the first thing they want to see at Sea World and invariably it’s the dolphins, leaping through hoops and snapping fish from the trainer’s hands. Images of dolphins feature in countless posters, carvings, photographs and documentaries as shining symbols of peace, and the pinnacle of New-Age dreams and aspirations. The dolphin has long been surfing the crest of a dream PR run and, it seems, can’t put a flipper wrong.

Until now. Yes, the time has come to highlight a darker, hitherto unseen side of our precious little friends, a side that those with vested interests are loathe to reveal. Recent studies suggest that behind that sleek, lovable façade lurks a malevolent, at times vicious beast, only too ready to take full advantage of man’s gullibility.

An extensive two year study of dolphins in the Maldives by a research team working aboard the research vessel SS Bluefin has revealed more about the dolphin than many would care to know. Greed, selfishness and vanity are among its more endearing qualities. Add to this list emotional blackmail, philandering, lying, bullying and cheating and the emerging picture is not pretty.

Contrary to the dolphin’s popular image of being human-friendly, the research team was alarmed to note that on more than on occasion pods of dolphins actually herded Great White Sharks towards divers. Other divers proffering food found themselves rammed by the beasts in vicious and seemingly unprovoked attacks.

But all this barely rates a mention compared to the case of the diver who was systematically pack raped by an entire pod. After his twenty-seventh dive back into the swirling melee of randy mammals he reportedly said “that’s it for me, I’m not going back in.”

The team found the animals to be highly voracious sexual predators who indulged in a smorgasbord of perverse carnal delights. One of the most shocking examples was of dolphins sexually abusing their young in debased paedophilic frenzies. The team reported: “We’d often see males sexually penetrating the blowholes of their young and, because of the phenomenal tantric staying power of the adult male, these young invariably suffocated before the climax of the act, after which their bodies were torn apart and eaten by the pod.”

Further to this, in decoding parts of the highly complex dolphin language, the team from the Bluefin established that dolphins were thugs who ostracised and bullied weaker and less well-developed members of the pod, with the victims often driven to beaching themselves in suicidal despair. Similarly, crippled, lame and aged dolphins were usually abandoned and left to fend for themselves on the high-seas, rarely surviving more than a week.

In fact so obnoxious did the dolphins become to the research team – who, to a man, had previously been totally smitten by the beasts – that they took to shooting them for sport.
I reveal this startling new information on the secret life of the dolphin in the public interest and, I might add, at considerable personal risk. Since going public I have received numerous anonymous threatening phone calls and letter bombs post-marked Byron Bay. But rest assured, as a representative of John West, I vow to strenuously and zealously pursue my campaign until the true facts relating to this scourge of the high sees are fully known.

“What can I do?” you ask. I’ll tell you what you can do. Next time you pick up a tin of dolphin-friendly tuna in the supermarket, do the environment a favour and put it back.

5 comments:

  1. Love your work Tug. Are you performing anywhere soon? I saw you at a book launch in Paddington for AJ Rochester some years ago and you changed my ideas about poetry!In fact, I'd love to learn performance poetry; got any ideas how to go about it?
    Desi Corbett (writer)

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  2. Next thing you'll be telling us Lassie was a boy ... oops.

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  3. Thanks Desi. Musta been lots of years ago if it was me and AJ launching a book at Paddo. Can't say I rightly recall the occasion. Anyway, if you're perverse enough to want to perform poetry, go to the school of hard Knocks, via the college of medium-cushioned blows, then turn left. dispense with any notions of money, fame or kudos, nurture your inner cynic till you're sick of the little prick and go for it! Tug X

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  4. Come, come Arch, Lassie was a "differently sexualised androgynous Cannine"

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