Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins – Susan Casey
It is clear from the first pages of Voices in the Ocean that Susan Casey is enchanted by dolphins, and her book does not shy away from the mysticism and wild attributions of almost supernatural powers that dog our toothed marine mammal friends. She is author of The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth, and favours an immersive and almost obsessive style of engagement with her subject. This makes for good reading.
Despite the persistent thread of woo running through the entire book, Casey manages to expose important and awful aspects of humans’ relationship with dolphins. Some of these are often overlooked. She visits dolphins in theme parks, goes to the cove at Taiji in Japan (location of a famous dolphin hunt), and – in what I view as the most important section of the book because the topic is so under-reported – the Solomon Islands.
The Solomon Islanders have a long history with dolphins, both slaughtering them for their teeth (as money), and capturing the animals to sell them to marine parks. The scale of the Solomon Islands’ involvement in dolphin killing and trade is massive and horrific. Some of the incidents are completely pointless, executed in order to hold conservation organisations to ransom. Casey visits the islands, meets some of the players, and tries to make sense of the chaos and menace she finds there.
Casey concludes with a study of the Minoan culture on Crete, a hopeful note after a trip into the hellish depths of depravity that seem to occur more often than not at the human-dolphin interface. You can read more about Voices in the Ocean at Outside Magazine, the Guardian, and the New York Times.
You can get a copy of the book here (South Africa), here or here.
