Anatomy of a misquote
I have been wronged, interweb friends! After being interviewed about my upcoming book by the Sunday Times, a series of news stories appeared where it was alleged that I stated that “dolphins are dimmer than chickens” and that dolphins engage in “gang rape.” I never said such obvious nonsense. The source for this “quote” appears to be a little editorial piece that accompanied the main article in the Sunday Times. It was only a few sentences long, and I think was meant to serve as a kind of light-hearted overview of the full article. Unfortunately, it included the following problematic sentence: “Not only are dolphins dimmer than the average chicken, says Justin Gregg, a zoologist, but they are capable of gang rape and acts of violence.”
The thing is, I didn’t say any of this. In fact, I harped on the point in my interview with the Sunday Times that it is wrong to suggest that dolphins are dumb, and that my book was about elevating the intelligence of other animal species, not about suggesting that dolphins are not intelligent. I have argued on my blog and in the book that dolphins are highly intelligent animals, but that it’s generally impossible to compare intelligence between species in this manner. In any event, dolphins quite clearly display more complex behavior than chickens on the whole, so this statement is wrong no matter how you slice it.
Furthermore, I have argued quite vehemently that there is no such this as dolphin rape. In fact, if you Google ‘dolphin rape’ you will see that my blog post debunking this myth is the first thing that comes up. I receive a huge number of visitors to my blog each day coming from internet searches for the phrase ‘dolphin rape.’ (sidenote: Why are you so interested in dolphin rape interwebs? Seriously, why?) In any event, I would never suggest that dolphins engage in gang rape. That is patently false.
But the meme of ‘dolphins dumber than chickens’ spread like a virus through the interwebs, and the painstakingly argued points I raise in a scholarly book that took me years to write have now been supplanted by an asinine quote that I would never have said AND strongly disagree with. To learn about what I actually say in my book, please read this blog post written in my own words or – better yet – the actual book!
