Have you ever heard of anyone ever getting bit/KILLED by a dolphin?

Dolphins sense things..it knew you were evil!

Just kidding. I’ve not heard of dolphins hurting people, just the opposite actually. I’ve read of many instances where dolphins protected people from sharks by swimming in circles around the swimmer.

Maybe it was having a bad day?

Just found this

Good god, that’s scary, Harp. (Even the picture of the cow at the bottom is scary.)
Great, enlightening question. shudder

I have always wondered about these programs from the animals’ point of view. It is sort of like a horse at a stable being ridden over and over by unskilled riders. No wonder they might snap. Then when you get outside the U.S. you have even fewer safeguards in place.

It sounds like a scary experience, and I am glad that you weren’t hurt. I think we should leave dolphins in the wild as much as possible.

I hate dolphins, they strike me as evil creatures for some reason. I have never heard of them biting anyone, but I have heard of them trying to rape people, LOL, I saw it on tv actually, on one of those “When animals attack” shows.

goodbye, and thanks for all the fish :^D

Maybe the Dolphin had rabies….

I haven’t heard that, but I have heard that dolphins have rape gangs.

Something to think about when you watch SeaQuest DSV again.

SeaQuest….lol…. i havent thought about that show in years!

Dophins are intelligent, social and gregarious animals. The mistake is in thinking they act (and think) like the other intelligent, social and gregarious specie that we know – us. They are a wild animal and a predator. Placing them in captivity and training them to certain behaviors does not make them “tame”, it makes them “habituated”.

The amazing thing is that there have been so few incidents in captivity. We’ve taken a far ranging, free swimming animal that often covers hundreds of miles of open ocean and trapped them in a small tank or lagoon and make them perform for food.

I admit the temptation to be close to these wonderful animals is there for me….I have vascillated on whether swimming with free ranging dolphins that have been habituated (or fed) by humans is ethical or not. For me, the closest that I’ve found is a researcher in Key West that has followed a pod for almost ten years now and severly restricts the types of interactions allowed. I’ve also had multiple accidental meetings in the ocean while swimming – no doubt the closest thing to a non-invasive interaction (and sometimes scaring the bejeesus out of me when a huge grey form slides silently by me just out of reach).

As to the specific question of injury by dolphin, you can look to reports from SeaWorld to answer that. When I was woking as a keeper, I scheduled an interview with SeaWorld for a keeper position – then I started talking to former keepers and various zoo personnel. Marine mammal trainers and keepers have an high rate of attack and injury (not surprisingly, SeaWorld does not advertise this fact). I have heard of a keeper who was fatally attacked and had his speen ruptured, but I suspect that that is an urban myth.

@andrew, they do indeed have rape gangs. Multiple males will target a specific female and chase her until exhausted, bumping and pushing her until she cannot flee or fight back. We place an unfair burden on dolphins when we expect them to meet up to our expectations of them based on myth.

I got kicked by a dolphin when swimming with one, when I swam back to my mum, she was like “was that fun?”
I replied yes with a grimace, since it had kicked me in the groin.