It was an unconventional love story for the ages, and while some of you might've heard about Dr. John Lilly's infamous 'Dolphinarium' of the 1960s, few know the real story of what happened and the tragic fate that befell Peter the Dolphin.
The story of Peter is told best by Margaret Howe Lovatt, who lifted the lid on the NASA-funded experiment in Christopher Riley's The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins from 2014.
Lovatt spent six months living with Peter in a flooded laboratory on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in the 1960s, with Lilly hoping to learn how dolphins communicate and even trying to teach them English.
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With dolphins being one of the most intelligent species on the planet, the team worked with Peter and two female dolphins called Pamela, and Sissy. Lovatt admitted that she developed a 'sensuous' relationship with Peter (via The Guardian), and after it was revealed that she used to 'manually' relieve him, the magazine Hustler much later printed a sensationalist story titled, "Interspecies Sex: Humans and Dolphins." Lovatt says she dashed to buy all the copies that she could, but with it now being available online, confesses: “It’s a bit uncomfortable. The worst experiment in the world, I’ve read somewhere, was me and Peter.
“That’s fine, I don’t mind. But that was not the point of it, nor the result of it. So I just ignore it"
Sadly, the experiment took a dark turn when Lilly was apparently unimpressed with the progress that was being made.
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A small selection of neuroscientists were licensed to use LSD, while Lilly had reportedly been injecting it into dolphins to see its effects since 1964. Although Lovatt managed to convince Lilly not to inject Peter, she says Pamela and Sissy were subjected to the drug.
Lovatt claims that by autumn 1966, Lilly was more interested in LSD and explained his interest in the dolphins was waning: "It didn’t have the zing to it that LSD did at that time. And in the end the zing won."
Lab director Gregory Bateson left, and after the funding was cut, Peter was moved alongside the other two dolphins to Lilly's other lab in a disused Miami bank building.
This was the beginning of the end, and looking back, Lovatt remembered: "I couldn’t keep Peter. If he’d been a cat or a dog, then maybe. But not a dolphin."
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Just a matter of weeks later, she got a phone call confirming that Peter had passed away: "I got that phone call from John Lilly. John called me himself to tell me. He said Peter had committed suicide."
With the new facility having much smaller captive tanks with little or no sunshine, dolphin activist Ric O'Barry explains that Peter might've made the choice to end his life: "Dolphins are not automatic air-breathers like we are.
"Every breath is a conscious effort. If life becomes too unbearable, the dolphins just take a breath and they sink to the bottom. They don’t take the next breath."
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Vet Andy Williamson put his own spin on it and attributes Peter’s death to a broken heart: "Margaret could rationalise it, but when she left, could Peter? Here’s the love of his life gone."
While Peter's story was one of tragedy, Lovatt found love during the experiment, married its photographer, and converted Lilly's Dolphinarium into a home where she raised her children.
Reflecting on Peter's death, Lovatt concluded: "I wasn’t terribly unhappy about it. I was more unhappy about him being in those conditions [at the Miami lab] than not being at all.
"Nobody was going to bother Peter, he wasn’t going to hurt, he wasn’t going to be unhappy, he was just gone. And that was OK. Odd, but that’s how it was.”