It’s a question as old as mankind itself: if you could be any animal other than a human, what would you be? For many, it would seem, the answer is simple.
“Fucking dolphins, eh, coz’ they’re the only other animals that root for fun,” says Trev from Tweed Heads, clutching his swollen loins in one hand and lofting a burnt-out durry in the other. Forget the flight of the eagle or the peaceful, grifting career of the sea turtle– for many, the one metric for measuring a creature’s quality of life is whether or not getting laid is as good as it is for humans.
It’s a pretty solid answer, to be fair– but it’s worth emphasising that there’s more to being a dolphin than just buggering blowholes all day. Much more, as it turns out.
Krista Nicholson, a researcher at Western Australia’s Murdoch University, studies the behaviour of dolphins in the waters off the coast of Mandurah, just south of Perth. Day to day, a scientist like Nicholson enjoys the privilege of watching dolphins get up to some seriously porpoise-ful shenanigans: engaging in pleasurable coitus, chucking sick tumble-turns in the sea, and absolutely cacking themselves over just about anything. On multiple occasions, says Nicholson, Australian scientists like herself have even caught dolphins getting high by sucking on toxic blowfish– or “blowies”, as one article in WA Today disturbingly calls them.
“In Australia, scientists had seen juveniles mouthing blowies in the Leschenault estuary in WA’s South West and a sub-adult dolphin carrying an inflated blowie for a few hours in the Kimberley,” reads the piece. The safe for work translation is that, apparently, these true blue Aussie dolphins are getting their buzz on by ingesting the lethal toxin present in the flesh and organs of blowfish.
Such dolphin debauchery was similarly documented a few years ago, in the 2014 BBC program Dolphins – Spy In The Pod. In the documentary, dolphins were filmed “passing the puffer fish around” like a prison yard roach, revelling in the narcotic effects of the toxic little puffer.
The real hero of this anthropomorphic tale, however, is a one-year-old calf by the name of Huubster. Huubster’s like that seventeen-year-old tag-along who drops his first tab and spends the rest of the night scrutinising a cushion. This young whippersnapper has really taken to the whole exercise of getting blazed on blowies, and has been observed getting stuck in to the stuff with the kind of no-fucks-given immoderation that’d make Trev from Tweed shit in his Etnies.
“On January 24, while other group members travelled slowly toward the ocean, Huubster was swimming belly-up tossing an inflated blowie up in the air,” recounts WA Today. “On a separate occasion, four days later, Ms Nicholson observed Huubster again tossing a blowie repeatedly in the surf just north of Lancelin.”
Huubster. That’s the animal I’d want to be.
Feature image: Screensaver Gift
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