For the last 17 years or so, marine biologists have begun paying a great deal of attention to dead baby dolphins and porpoises of all ages washing up ashore, and we quote, 'mangled in unexpected ways.'
The discovery that Bottlenose Dolphins were occasionally viciously reconfiguring their own children wasn't really all that much of a big deal. Humans are the only species on the planet that actually gives even a tiny **** about infanticide. It was what the dolphins were doing to the porpoises that entered the domain of the 'seriously ****ed-up'.
Thirteen-foot male Bottlenose Dolphins were hunting down porpoises, beating to death and then playing with their corpses, all for no readily apparent reason. At the time of this writing, the majority opinion of the marine science community was that this breathtakingly savage interspecies homicide is for--and this is Science, here--****s 'n' giggles.
Reports of ludicrously sexually aggressive dolphins attempting to rape human women abound from all over the globe. And in 1994, a male Bottlenose off the coast of San Paolo, Brazil, that was noted to be fond of female human swimmers attacked a pair of human males that the dolphin apparently considered to be competition ... and killed one of them.
Sure, some accounts say the man was drunk, and was actively trying to shove a stick into the dolphin's blowhole at the time. And several locals had apparently first tried to drag it out of the water so they could take a picture with it, maybe first dressing it up with a top hat and monocle.
And here, of course, we have arrived at our lesson: when dealing with animals, you need to forget everything you learned from cartoons. The results can be deadly otherwise.
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