I’m not sure why Marginal Revolution only just now linked to a Guardian article from 2003, but it’s still a seriously good read. The dolphin in the article was trained to help keep her pool clean by bringing any waste paper that falls into her pool to the keepers for a reward. Over time, one of the dolphins learned to trick the humans. Instead of immediately giving a big piece of litter to her keepers, she would hide it and only tear off small pieces to give to a keeper each time one passed, thereby earning more fish as a reward.
What’s even more impressive is that since she has also been trained to bring gulls (I’m not sure if they’re dead or alive at this point) that fly into her pool to the humans in return for a reward, she learned to keep some of the fish that she’d been given. Once the humans went away, she used the extra fish as bait to lure gulls to fly into her pool to catch them so that the humans would give her more fish for the gull. The rest of the article is filled with similarly fascinating anecdotes.
Science-fiction of course has long been full of stories about dolphins being intelligent, the entire plot of the fourth Star Trek film being the most obvious example. But this article lead me to thinking back to opinions of people like Australian SF author Greg Egan, who believes that our current treatment of some animals amount to human rights violations that will one day be recognized as a historically shameful era of our species.
What a coincidence. I am now reading Book 6 of David Brin’s Uplift novel series, where dolphins have been “uplifted” to become intelligent sapient beings.
Book 6? I’ve read the first book or two of the series and a handful of Brin’s short stories set in the Uplift universe, but they didn’t really grab me. Greg Egan is my favourite SF writer, but his all his best work was in the 1990s. He seems to have run out of really good ideas.
I find David Brin’s style to be “slow to warm up”. Book 1 felt like a detective novel. Nothing spectacular. Book 2 starts slowly and only gets exciting towards the end. Book 3 is also like that. I quite enjoy the series from Book 2 onwards. I liked the rich world / background created in the series. Books 4 – 6 are actually one big book, and it’s the same thing – most of Book 1 is quite slow, and it only starts getting exciting towards the end.
I have not read Greg Egan before. Which are the good ones from him?
I hesitate to unreservedly recommend Egan because he undoubtedly appeals only to a very specific niche. Your best bet is to visit his official website and see if you like his stuff. Short stories are his best form, and he makes plenty of them available for reading for free there:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/
If I had to pick a specific Egan novel that I like best, it would be Diaspora.
https://calltoreason.org/?p=12
Again, however, Egan’s best work is in short stories. Actually I think that for many other SF writers, their short stories represent their best work as well, but because there’s no money to be made in this form, they eventually give up on them.