Do As I Say..

Do you ever have one of those moments where confusion crosses your mind like fast-moving clouds in the sky? The phrase for this on Fark.com is "wait a minute...." and that is what happened to me yesterday.

While taking a leisurely cruise up the coast of Florida, my wife and decided to stop at Marineland, a place of excitement in our youth. A place that stood up there with Silver Springs and WeekeeWachie, entertainment meccas that are either gone or reduced to almost nothing. The arrival of Disney, Universal Studios and Sea World in Orlando back in the 70's really killed these small-town places. Now Marineland is a place to go have a session in the water with dolphins for a few hundred bucks...and there is no big line of customers waiting to do that. We paid the $8 general admission fee to come in and look around and it was more fun than I would have thought. I watched the dolphins playing and getting trained by the young women and asked one of the women about dolphin behavior in the wild. Specifically, I was asking about dolphins mostly ignoring me altogether when I was surfing or kayaking, but occasionally seeing a couple in south Florida come up to the boat looking for handouts. She then started off on a lecture about how it's illegal to feed dolphins and that some fishermen caused all this and are disrupting the environment. I questioned that a bit, because everywhere I go I see pelicans coming around docks for fish scraps. If someone is teaching a few pelicans how to do that, then we need to learn that process for our own school system. As she went on about how delicate the dolphins are in the wild, my eyes wandered back to the pools behind her, watching the trainer holding a small bait fish up in the air for the dolphin to jump up and catch. I remembered that a bird trainer once told me that the way to train animals with food is to keep them hungry, and then it occurred to me that the dolphins I saw in south Florida at least had a choice about where their food came from....