Dr. Lori Marino (vegan): Supporting Animal-people Advocacy through Scientific Research, Part 1 of 2

Dr. Lori Marino (vegan) is an American neuroscientist and an internationally renowned expert on animal-people behavior and intelligence. She is the founder and executive director of the Kimmela Center for Scholarship-based Animal Advocacy and the founder and president of the Whale Sanctuary Project. In June 2019, Supreme Master Ching Hai (vegan) presented the Whale Sanctuary Project the Shining World Compassion Award plus a US$10,000 humble token contribution for the rehabilitation and care of whale-people. For 20 years, Dr. Marino also served as a faculty member at Emory University in Georgia, USA.

In a 2001 groundbreaking study, Dr. Lori Marino and fellow marine scientist, Dr. Diana Reiss proved, for the first time, that dolphin-people can recognize themselves in a mirror. She then began to realize the immense cruelty of keeping such intelligent beings in captivity.

Using her status as an expert on cetacean intelligence, Dr. Marino now campaigns tirelessly against keeping them captive, especially in zoos and marine parks. These facilities, she says, often argue that they are keeping whale-people and dolphin-people in captivity for so-called “educational purposes.” Dr. Lori Marino now shares her thoughts on so-called “dolphin-assisted therapy.” “But I would tell people that it is not one that’s substantiated. And in fact, I would have to say that, it is also a way to exploit people, vulnerable people, because you have parents of, say, children who have autistic characteristics spending thousands of dollars to have them swim in a tank with a dolphin because somebody tells them that that’s going to help them. And they are just as much victimized by the claims of the Dolphin-Assisted Therapy industry as the dolphins themselves. So, I would tell people, ‘Stay away from it. It’s snake oil.’”

We asked Dr. Marino about using innocent, helpless animal-people in biomedical research. Is this practice still necessary? “We now have many alternatives, and more and more every day that are allowing us to disengage from the use of other animals in research, medical research. We have to put all our time and money into developing alternatives so that we can uncouple from the use of other animals.”

“We try to convince ourselves that somehow, we’re something other than the other animals, that we’re different, separate, apart, better, and in control of them. And that’s speciesism. And that’s what leads us to do the kinds of awful things that we do to other animals, just as racism leads us to do awful things to other humans.”