A man’s lower leg is in a cast. His dog starts limping in sympathy.
I find this utterly amazing.
I would like to see what contraption the dog comes up with in response to his owner rolling about on a wheelchair…
Dolphins are very imitative and will try to imitate anything they see people doing. If you flap your hands, they will flap their flippers. One day, one of our trainers taught one of the dolphins to twirl a frisbee on the end of its snout, just for kicks. The dolphin must have thought it was a kick too because it spent the rest of the night and the entire next week twirling a frisbee. Almost immediately, the other dolphin started doing the same, just from watching the first one. Then they started inventing games like putting the smaller frisbee inside the larger one and twirling them both.
Being imitative doesn’t always work out for the best. There is a story out there about a dolphin that lived in a tank with a manatee. They fed the manatee sea-grass. By-and-by the dolphin died. They found its stomach packed with sea-grass. The dolphin had been stealing sea-grass from the manatee and eating it. Dolphins can’t digest vegetable matter so it just accumulated.
There is a story from Sea Life Park (dolphin show place in Honolulu) that they trained two dolphins to do two entirely different shows. Each dolphin was kept in a nearby holding tank while the other dolphin did its show. One day, one of the dolphins did the whole show but very poorly. Only after the fact did the trainers discover that they had brought out the wrong dolphin. The dolphin had done the other dolphin’s entire show without ever having been trained for it, just from watching from the holding tank area.
Am I the only one who finds keeping dolphins in a tank so that they can perform, distasteful?
Well, no, you’re not the only one. There are definitely a spectrum of attitudes about that. Dolphins are very sociable and they’re attention whores, so they actually seem to like performing. But they’re really smart, and I tended to worry more about how bored they must be in between performing and training sessions. Of course, nobody ever asked the dolphins if that’s what they really wanted to do with their life.
ETA: It’s a known fact that many dolphins will perform just for the interaction with the trainers. You don’t need to feed them fish for every action they do. They would continue to “work” even after training sessions ended, but then they would get creative and make games of it.
ETA2: The place I worked (1980-1984) wasn’t a dolphin show, BTW. It was a research laboratory.
It isn’t just distasteful; it is horrific, especially when you consider that the dolphins and orcas used in shows are largely not rescues but are bred or captured expressly for the purpose of being trained into show animals. These are highly intelligent and extremely social creatures that clearly suffer psychologically and often physically from the constraints of living in extreme confinement and without social contact to a familial pod, and this practice should be universally prohibited, as should the keeping of elephants, primates, and other intelligent non-domestic animals for entertainment or as ‘pets’.
As for the story in the o.p., I don’t find it surprising in the least. Dogs in particular are not only social animals but are evolved to emulate human emotional responses and behaviors. Intelligent dogs will often attempt to simulate the behaviors they their owners do in the same way that a child (or for that matter, an adult) will often do.
Stranger
No. Not the only one.
The dog is favoring a left paw while the owner’s cast is on the right.
Dumb dog.