A dolphin trainer whose aquatic student ended up ‘falling in love’ with her during their lessons has admitted to giving the animal a helping hand when it began to feel aroused. There’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d write today. The bizarre task was taken on by Margaret Howe Lovatt after she began working alongside John Lilly; an American neuroscientist who had opened a lab with financial backing from NASA as he sought to nurture closer relationships between humans and dolphins.
In order to try to fulfill one of Lilly’s dreams—teaching the dolphins to speak English—Lovatt lived with one specific dolphin, named Peter, for three months while she was in the lab.
She gave the following explanation, as reported by The Guardian: “I chose to work with Peter because he had not had any human-like sound training and the other two had.”
The scientific nature of the investigation was hampered when Lovatt discovered that Peter was’extremely, very interested in [her] anatomy’.
Since dolphins “get sexual urges,” according to Andy Williamson, who oversaw the health of the animals, Lovatt first attempted to assist Peter by reuniting him with two other female dolphins at the facility.
“t would just become part of what was going on, like an itch – just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that’s really all it was,” she said. “I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter.”
Though Lovatt was still focused on her research, she admitted her encounters with Peter began to overshadow the experiment – particularly when a story about them appeared in Hustler magazine.
“It’s a bit uncomfortable,” she said, looking back. “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.”
However, Lovatt took matters into her own hands as it got too disruptive to keep transferring Peter to be with his female companions. literally.
‘Manually’ Lovatt started to relieve Peter herself.
“It was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen,” she said in a BBC documentary. It was so gentle and precious. Peter was there, and he was aware that I was there.
According to Lovall, although the act may have been’sexual’ on Peter’s end, it wasn’t for her.
But she also said, “Sensuous, perhaps.”
