Wild Animals and Ethical Perspectives | 603 grams were developed to try to persuade the local community and visitors to leave the dolphins alone, but they failed The allure of increasingly friendly dolphins was too great, and people could not resist joining them in the water, thereby largely unwittingly changing the behavior of these animals, making them more vulnerable to harm The stories of Dave and Marra are being repeated across the world There are many other solitary-sociable dolphins Many are bottlenose dolphins, but there are also solitary-sociable Risso’s dolphins and belugas Orcas can also show this behavior, and the famous case of Luna, a juvenile living in Nootka Sound in Canada, killed in March, 2006, by a tugboat propeller, is now the subject of a remarkable award-winning film Friendly whales and dolphins are vulnerable not only to accidental harm, but also to deliberate attack There are at least four examples of such animals being deliberately killed by humans, while others have mysteriously disappeared (Samuels et al., 2000; Frohoff et al., 2006) On the other hand, it is suggested that some solitarysociables reunite with their own kind, and there is at least one famous example of a solitary-sociable who has mainly survived apart from his species for several decades A case can be made that a fully habituated solitary dolphin benefits from the presence of its human friends, because they may be meeting its social needs But they may actually be inhibiting the animal from seeking its own kind, and are almost certainly putting it at risk from other dangerous human interactions Dolphins deserve their reputation for being gentle and friendly Very few dolphin-human interactions have ended in serious harm to people, all the more remarkable bearing in mind the animals’ size and superior aquatic abilities The weight of scientific opinion is that we are generating increasing numbers of animals that lose their natural fear and seek to interact with us The fact that we are increasingly invading their environment may be facilitating this Thus, we need to work out how to offer them better protection or how to prevent this habituation to humans Further Reading Eisfeld, S M., Simmonds, M P., Stansfield, L R (in press) Behavior of a solitary sociable female bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) off the coast of Kent, SE England Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science Frohoff, T., Vail, C S, & Bossley, M 2006 Preliminary Proceedings of the Workshop on the Research and Management of Solitary Sociable Odontocetes convened at the 16th Bienniel Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, San Diego, California, December 10, 2005 Samuels, A., Bejder, L., and Heinrich, S 2000 A review of the literature pertaining to swimming with wild dolphins Prepared for the US Marine Mammal Commission Simmonds, M P 2006 Into the brains of whales Applied Animal Behaviour 100: 103–116 Simmonds, M P., and Stansfield, L 2007 Solitary-sociable dolphins in the UK British Wildlife 19: 96–101 White, T I 2007 In defense of dolphins: The new moral frontier Madden, MA: Blackwell Public Philosophy Series Mark P Simmonds WILD ANIMALS AND ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES Few ethicists today doubt that humans have duties toward domestic animals, but the question of duties to wild animals is more vexing Some of the leading issues are hunting and trapping, animal