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How A Science Experiment Led to Sexual Encounters Between a Woman and a Dolphin

A new documentary tells the story of Margaret Howe Lovatt, who in the 1960s took part in a NASA-funded research project, in which she developed an unusual relationship with a dolphin named Peter.

On June 17th, the BBC will debut a new documentary, The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins . It's the story of Margaret Howe Lovatt, who in the 1960s took part in a NASA-funded research project, in which she developed an unusual relationship with a dolphin named Peter. A relationship that at times became sexual.

The emotional attachment between humans and animals is well documented. Like any animal and human who spend long amounts of time together, a dolphin trainer could say they "love" their dolphin, but this does not excuse nor open the door for zoophilia or delphinophilia. While I am a dolphin enthusiast, I am also a firm believer that humans and dolphins should not have sex.

Investigating the case of Margaret Howe Lovatt and Peter the dolphin, it was a relationship that started out of a logistical problem. In 1964, Lovatt was working on an experiment to try to teach Peter how to communicate with humans. ( A dolphin to human translator is still in the works today. ) She literally moved in with him for three months , sleeping next to the tank, and working on a desk that hung over the water where he swam. They spent a great deal of time together, and as Peter was a sexually maturing adolescent dolphin, he often had sexual urges at inconvenient times.

As it turns out, it's very difficult to teach a dolphin to talk when he is aroused. Lovatt found that Peter " would rub himself on my knee, my foot or my hand." She allowed it, "I wasn't uncomfortable — as long as it wasn't too rough. It was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen, it was very precious and very gentle, Peter was right there, he knew that I was right there."

In order to satisfy Peter's increasing sexual urges, he would be transported to another pool with two female dolphins. This was a logistical nightmare and it disrupted his communication lessons constantly. Eventually, Lovatt took it upon herself to relieve Peter of his urges, rather than going through the long and inconvenient process of transporting him, " It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch, just get rid of that scratch and we would be done and move on."

Sexual acts between dolphins and humans have a history. Malcolm Brenner wrote the book Wet Goddess about his nine-month long relationship with a dolphin. At the Nottingham Trent University, Dr. Mark Griffiths has studied delphinophiles (humans sexually attracted to dolphins.) There are also a number of blogs and online communities dedicated to the study and appreciation of dolphin sex. (Note: this link is graphic and contains details of zoophilia, click at your discretion.)

The relationship between Lovatt and Peter was certainly unnatural, but not unheard of. Still, I strongly urge you to stay away from dolphins in a sexual capacity, even if you believe they turn into handsome men at night .

You can watch the full clip below and see more previews on the BBC's YouTube page .

About the Author

In 1965, a young woman lived in isolation with a male dolphin in the name of science. It got weird

Week 5 of Margaret Howe’s diary is concerned with a new issue: Peter's 'sexual needs' are frustrating research. She decides to take matters into her own hands

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From outside it looked like another spacious Virgin Islands villa with a spiral staircase twisting up to a sunny balcony overlooking the Caribbean Sea. But Dolphin Point Laboratory on the island of St Thomas was part of a unique Washington-funded research institute run by Dr John C Lilly, the wackiest and most polarizing figure in marine science history. A medic and neurologist by training, a mystic by inclination, he was intent on furthering his investigations into the communication skills of dolphins, who he believed could help us talk to extraterrestrials.

For 10 weeks, from June to August 1965, the St Thomas research centre became the site of Lilly’s most notorious and highly criticized experiment, when his young assistant, Margaret Howe, volunteered to live in confinement with Peter, a bottlenose dolphin. The dolphin house was flooded with water and redesigned for a specific purpose: to allow the 23-year-old Howe and the dolphin to live, sleep, eat, wash and play intimately together. The objective of the experiment was to see whether a dolphin could be taught human speech – a hypothesis that Lilly, in 1960, predicted could be a reality “within a decade or two.”

In 1965, a young woman lived in isolation with a male dolphin in the name of science. It got weird Back to video

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Even dolphin experts who today hold some of Lilly’s other work in high regard believe it was deeply misguided. Media coverage at the time focused on two things: Howe’s almost total failure to teach Peter to speak; and the reluctant sexual relationship she began with the animal in an effort to put him at his ease. She has not spoken about her experiences for nearly 50 years (to “let [the story] fade”), but earlier this year accepted an interview request by the BBC producer Mark Hedgecoe, who thought it was “the most remarkable story of animal science I had ever heard.”

The result, a documentary called The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, is set to premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest and then on BBC Four later in June. Various films and documentaries have dissected some of the baffling, entertaining and ultimately tragic animal-human language experiments offered up by the Sixties and Seventies, most recently James Marsh’s 2011 feature Project Nim, about a chimp raised in a New York family. But what makes the dolphin house story unique is the intensity of the period of interspecies cohabitation. Howe and Peter lived in complete isolation.

Prof Thomas White, a philosopher and international leader in the field of dolphin ethics, believes the experiment was “cruel” and flawed from the outset. “Lilly was a pioneer,” he says. “Not just in the study of the dolphin brain; he was an open-minded scientist who speculated very early on that dolphins are self-aware creatures with emotional vulnerabilities that need an array of relationships to flourish. That should have made him think: ’I really shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing’?”

Lilly, who had gained the scientific establishment’s respect with his work on the human brain, became interested in dolphins in the Fifties, after performing a series of “inner-consciousness” investigations on himself in which he floated around for hours in salt water in an effort to block outside stimuli and increase his sensitivity.

His 1961 book Man and Dolphin was an international bestseller. It was the first book to claim that dolphins displayed complex emotions – that they were capable of controlling anger, for example, and that they, like humans, often trembled in response to being hurt. Some dolphin species, he said, had brains up to 40% larger than humans’. As well as being our “cognitive equal,” Lilly speculated they were capable of a form of telepathy that was the key to understanding extraterrestrial communication. He also believed they could “teach us to live in outer space without gravity”. He also proposed that they could be trained to serve the Navy as a “glorified seeing-eye” (a theory that became the basis of the 1973 sci-fi thriller Day of the Dolphin, despite Lilly’s best attempts to halt production).

If you want to do your experiments on solitude and LSD, please keep them in the isolation room. I am not curious or interested

But Lilly did little to burnish his credentials in the early Sixties when he started exploring the psychological research possibilities offered by lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). He took it himself, often while floating in his isolation tank. Lilly later pinpointed 1965, the year of the dolphin cohabitation experiment, as the year he came to “no longer regard the scientific viewpoint of total objectivity as the be-all and end-all.” It wouldn’t be wildly speculative to suggest that Lilly was – by today’s standards at least – not in quite the right frame of mind to be leading the dolphin project.

Looking back at his memories of the mid-Sixties in his autobiography, an impressionistic account in which he writes of himself in the third person (“He felt that he was merely a small microbe on a mudball, rotating around a G-star, two thirds of the way from Galactic centre…”), it is also apparent how removed he was from Howe’s work.

He writes: “In the midst of his enthusiasm he [Lilly] attempted to speak to [Howe] of his experiences.” Howe, in her early 20s, was not sympathetic. “If you want to do your experiments on solitude and LSD, please keep them in the isolation room. I am not curious or interested.”

Howe was among many keen young staff members he employed from the island. Only the bravest stayed with him any significant length of time; as Lilly noted in The Mind of the Dolphin (1967), the Tursiops (bottlenose) – chosen for study because its brain size was comparable to man’s – was larger and more powerful than most humans. They grew irritable and angry when mismanaged. Howe’s talent for communicating with the dolphins was exceptional and, as Lilly noted, her dedication was unmatched by anyone else in the faculty. “I will not interfere with that,” he wrote.

Still, he prepared the experiment. Following a week-long trial period, Lilly decided 10 weeks was the maximum time frame that both human and dolphin could survive comfortably in confinement. Objectives, regulations and a daily timetable were clear and precise. Howe’s aims were threefold: to make notes on interspecies isolation, to attempt to teach Peter to “speak,” and to gather information so that the living conditions might be improved for longer-term cohabitation.

Cooking is fine. Cleaning is interesting… Each morning most of the dirt is neatly deposited at the foot of the elevator shaft. All I have to do is suck it up

On June 15 Howe moved in, her hair cut to a quarter-inch boy crop. All she needed was a swimming costume and a leotard for the cooler nights. The entire upstairs of the lab building and the balcony had been flooded with salt water 18in deep, which Peter could swim around in and Howe could wade through. A desk hung from the ceiling, and her bed was a suspended foam mattress that she later fitted with a shower curtain so that Peter’s splashes did not soak her through the night. She would live off canned food to minimise contact with outsiders.

“It was perfect,” she remembers today of her domestic dolphinarium. Early entries in her diary at the time reveal that, like a nervous new housewife, she made the best of things: “Cooking is fine. Cleaning is interesting… Each morning most of the dirt is neatly deposited at the foot of the elevator shaft. All I have to do is suck it up.” As for her companion, he spent “a good deal of his time in front of the mirror,” she noted. She was amused to find that during rare moments of contact with the outside world (mostly on the telephone) Peter talked “very loudly and in a competitive way” over the top of her.

Although he could be rambunctious, the archive footage of his lessons featured in the new BBC documentary reveal Peter to have been a curious, dedicated student. Lilly’s team had already established that dolphins could adjust the frequency of their squeaks and whistles to mimic human sounds, and claimed that during his time with Howe, Peter learnt to pronounce words such as “ball” and “diamond”, and to tell the difference between certain objects.

Howe was a creative, commendably patient teacher; when Peter struggled with certain sounds, particularly the “M” in her name, she came up with the inventive method of painting her face in thick white make-up and black lipstick so that he could clearly see the shape of her lips moving. “His eye was in [the] air looking at my mouth. There was no question… He really wanted to know: where is that noise coming from? What is the sound?” she remembers. “Eventually he kind of rolled over so that he would bubble [the ’M’ sound] into the water.”

To those who lived and worked with Peter, his progress was perhaps clearer than it was to the outsider. The average viewer, on watching the BBC documentary, might conclude that the experiment was a failure. Kenneth Norris, an influential marine biologist, said of Lilly: “He started out as a capable scientist, but nothing he did was subject to measurement or truth, and that’s what scientists live by.” Experiments since 1965 have proved that dolphins have high levels of self-awareness and can understand human sign communication – but there is still little evidence that a dolphin language exists.

Peter begins having erections and has them frequently when I play with him

However, Peter’s linguistic progress was seemingly what kept Howe going when their relationship grew strained. Fed up and clearly exhausted by week three, she wrote at length about Peter whining and making loud noises night and day for no apparent reason: “I will do anything to break this… I lost my temper and nearly yelled at Peter… I am physically so pooped I can hardly stand… depression… wanting to get away… my mind is not all on the job.”

Lilly, responding to Howe’s feedback, recorded his concerns. “This is a dull and small area… Isolation effects showing,” he wrote. Howe’s diary of week five is predominantly concerned with a new issue: “Peter begins having erections and has them frequently when I play with him.” Her frustrated efforts to deal with his “sexual needs” and advances – which had become so aggressive that her legs were covered in minor injuries from his jamming and nibbling – had left her scared. “Peter could bite me in two,” she wrote. But she was reluctant to hamper progress, and, in a spirit of pragmatism, decided to take matters into her own hands. As the narrator in the documentary tactfully puts it: “Margaret felt that the best way of focusing his mind back on his lessons was to relieve his desires herself manually.”

Sex among dolphins is a “normal way to establish a bond”, White says. “Dolphins are mostly bisexual, sometimes heterosexual, sometimes homosexual, and quite frequent – eight to 10 times a day I’ve been told – so it’s a very different culture that we’re looking at.” Peter’s sexual advances wouldn’t surprise any marine biologist. But what astonished Lilly was the complexity of the way Peter and Howe’s relationship developed from thereon in.

“New totally unexpected sequence of events took place,” Lilly noted excitedly. “I feel that we are in the midst of a new becoming; moving into a previous unknown…” As Peter became increasingly gentle, tactile and sensitive to Howe’s feelings he began to “woo” her by softly stroking his teeth up and down her legs. “I stand very still, legs slightly apart, and Peter slides his mouth gently over my shin,” she wrote in her diary. “Peter is courting me… he has been most persistent and patient… Obviously a sexy business… The mood is very gentle, still and hushed… all movements are slow.” Today she talks about the whole experience philosophically: “It was very precious. It was very gentle… It was sexual on his part. It was not sexual on mine. Sensual, perhaps.”

Howe’s writing also reflects her increasingly protective feelings towards Peter, and at the end of her diary she admits that Peter’s attentiveness helped her overcome her “depression” and “fits of self-pity.”

It was great [Howe] wasn’t going to be damaged… but as a veterinarian, I wondered about poor Peter. This dolphin was madly in love with her

In a neat romantic twist, it all ended happily for Howe. She left the lab to marry the project’s photographer, John Lovatt. Though dismayed to lose her, even Lilly was pleased: “Her intraspecies needs are finally being taken care of.” She never returned to work for him. Soon after the experiment, Lilly’s funding began to dry up, and with his second marriage in tatters he left to explore mystical interests in South America.

As for Peter, the lab’s vet Andy Williamson remembers his concerns as the experiment came to a close: “It was great [Howe] wasn’t going to be damaged… but as a veterinarian, I wondered about poor Peter. This dolphin was madly in love with her.”

The unexpected consequences of the experiment highlight one of the persisting problems with the “short-sighted” scientific approach to animal intelligence, says White. “We focus on language as the primary indicator of intelligence. Dolphins, like humans, are very sophisticated emotionally as well as intellectually. From an ethical standpoint, that’s what we should be looking at.”

The Sunday Telegraph

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Woman admits she had sex with a dolphin who took his own life after heartbreak

Margaret howe lovatt was just 20 when she started work in a lab with the aim of understanding dolphins and teaching them to speak english.

12:15, 3 Apr 2020
Updated 12:45, 17 Sep 2021

Margaret Howe Lovatt had loved animals since she was a little girl.

One of her first memories is being given a book about a talking cat by her mother when she was just a child.

It sparked a life-long fascination with animals and how they communicate and led to her becoming a key part of a NASA funded experiment in the 1960s.

Margaret explained: "It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility."

Unlike most children, Margaret didn't grow out of dreaming about one day communicating with animals.

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Her dreams came true at Christmas in 1963, when she was living in the Caribbean island of St Thomas.

Margaret's brother-in-law mentioned there was a secret lab at one end of the island where they were carrying out work with dolphins.

Unable to resist, Margaret, who was just 20, had to drive out there to have a look - and she was greeted by Gregory Bateson.

He was the director of the lab and was instantly impressed by the young woman who had marched up to him and told him she wanted to be involved and would do anything she could to help.

He allowed Margaret to observe the dolphins and write down everything she observed - despite having no scientific training she was skilled at spotting animal behaviour and her place in the study was secured.

Margaret remembers vividly what she saw the first time she observed the three dolphins.

She explained: "Peter, Pamela and Sissy. Sissy was the biggest. Pushy, loud, she sort of ran the show.

"Pamela was very shy and fearful. And Peter was a young guy. He was sexually coming of age and a bit naughty."

When Margaret first met the trio of dolphins they were housed in a sea pool below the lab, where they could be observed daily.

Funded by NASA, the scheme was to determine whether or not the dolphins could be trained to understand, and speak, English.

But scientists were determined to get a closer look at the creatures and came up with a bizarre plan to watch them in every day life.

They, along with Margaret's help, transformed an ordinary home into a domestic dolphianrium by flooding it with knee-deep water.

This meant those working on the project could live with the animals and observe them 24 hours a day.

And as Margaret spent more times with the majestic creatures, she formed ever closer bonds with them - especially Peter.

She explained: "Peter liked to be... with me. He would rub himself on my knee, my foot or my hand and I allowed that.

"I wasn't uncomfortable - as long as it wasn't too rough. In the beginning I would put him on the elevator and say you go play with the girls for a day.

"It was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen, it was very precious and very gentle, Peter was right there, he knew that I was right there."

Margaret claims this became a regular part of her studies, as she tried to teach Peter to speak English.

She added: "It was sexual on his part - it was not sexual on mine, sensuous perhaps.

"It would just become part of what was going on like an itch, just get rid of that we'll scratch and we would be done and move on.

"I was there to get to know Peter, that was part of Peter."

However, when the experiment's funding ran out the pair were separated and Peter was shipped 1,000 miles away to a small lab in Florida.

But it was too much for seemingly heartbroken Peter, who died just a few weeks later in an apparent act of suicide.

"I got that phone call from John Lilly. John called me himself to tell me. He said Peter had committed suicide," Margaret told The Guardian .

The lab's vet, Andy Williamson, attributed the dolphin's death to a broken heart, stating: "Margaret could rationalize it, but when she left, could Peter? Here’s the love of his life gone."

Ric O’Barry, from animal rights organisation The Dolphin Project, also backed the description of Peter's death as "suicide", adding: "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."

The lab had been created by American neuroscientist, Dr John Lilly, who had been studying large-brained marine mammals for years.

He hoped his experiment on the Caribbean island would enable the dolphins to make human-like sounds through their blow holes and enable them to communicate with humans.

Dr Lilly secured NASA's financial backing as he felt it would enable the understanding of other intelligent life forms who use a different form of communication.

However, what had started as an innocent experience became embroiled in scandal by the time it closed down.

Not only was there Margaret's relationship with Peter, there were also rumours the dolphins had been abused when they were given LSD.

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