Moko, a local dolphin in New Zealand, rescued two whales stranded on a beach. Malcolm Smith is a conservation officer along with many others that tried for an hour and a half to get the whales off, but with no success they had to give up. However, Moko the hero communicated with the whales and led them back to safety, preventing the mother and her calf from death. Moko is a bottle nose dolphin that plays with swimmers off Mahia beach.
Smith told BBC that the dolphin saw trouble and quickly came to the scene. He also said, “I don’t speak dolphin and I don’t speak whale, but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea. The dolphins did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.”
Moko went back to her usual play, but the whales weren’t seen ever since the incident. Afterwards, Smith gave Moko a pat on the back (literally) for doing such a great job. It’s funny how humans save lives all the time, but this time it wasn’t us. Frequently, we underestimate the intelligence of animals in our environment.
A group of dolphins protected men from a great white shark, also in New Zealand, in 2004. I found this out from Animal Rights Articles, and the editor of this site said, “If animals are compassionate enough to protect humans, shouldn’t we be even more compassionate in our care and protection of animals? This is a very important question for human beings, particularly those who consider themselves to be superior beings.” I absolutely agree with this statement.
If they could, I’m sure animals would make their own wildlife reserves and save much more animals than we do, because of their communication skills. The inter specie communication is unbelievably fantastic, and we can use this to our advantage by giving creatures like Moko the opportunity to help out. -Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7291501.stm http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/12/nz.whales.ap/index.html http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-dolphins.html
March 28, 2008 at 5:31 pm
This is a very interesting story, and shocking, too. Still, we as people don’t realize that things like these are going on during our everyday lives. I read a book a while ago full of true stories about animal heroes—some of the stories were really amazing. I definitely think we underestimate the intelligence of animals, and because we’ve started to accept that animals are quite smart, I think we’ll soon learn to better understand them. This article is a great demonstration of that.