Was he a doctor or a scientist? Or just really good at training animals? Was a necropsy every performed on the animal? I ask cause I have no idea.
What I do know, is sometimes dolphins are sick and just stop breathing. I have worked with many sick dolphins. Some can be rehabilitated and released, other just die. How or why is he convinced that the animal did not have some infection?
I had one dolphin “look me in the eye and just stop breathing” once too. But he did not commit suicide. He stopped breathing because he had a fungal infection that caused swelling in his brain. We know this because we used real science and a necropsy to determine it. I suppose we could have just made some shit up, but what would the point of that be? Other than to help the “I <3 Animals” agenda, I mean.
That isn’t suicide - at best, it’s sacrifice; animals that do this don’t do it because they want to die, they do it because they want their children to live (insofar as it can be said they want at all).
Underdstanding death and being able to apply its inevitability to one’s self are two different things entierly. Take children, for instance. They may be able to understand that grandma has died and grieve for her, but they don’t necessarily grasp the concept that they, too, will die one day. Hell, I’d gander to say that it doesn’t totally become a concrete concept with some folks until adulthood.
I think animals are much like children in that respect. They understand death as something that happens to others and are deeply affected by grief, but they don’t really apply that concept to* themselves*. To do tha requires a higher reasoning capability and even in the most intelligent of animals, such as apes and whales, I don’t see any evidence to support the notion they have it.
I don’t know the answer to your question. I know he was a professional trainer. He trained all five flipper dolphins. He was very close to the one and claims committed suicide. Perhaps his emotional attachment clouds his view.
