Margaret Howe Lovatt is a volunteer naturalist from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. In the 1960s, she took part in a NASA-funded research project in which she attempted to teach a dolphin named Peter to understand and mimic human speech. As a child, she was inspired by a book called Miss Kelly, a story about a cat that communicated with humans. This inspired her to research teaching animals to speak human language.
When she was in her early 20s, she lived on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where she had a laboratory to research dolphins. The director of the lab, Gregory Bateson, allowed her to observe dolphin behavior despite her lack of scientific training. At the same lab, she met John C. Lilly, a neuroscientist with the California Institute of Technology. He was building a research laboratory with funding from NASA and the United States Navy with the goal of speaking to extraterrestrial life forms. In order to simulate this situation he built a "Dolphinarium", a dolphin-house flooded with water, on Saint Thomas. There Lilly accommodated three dolphins, two females named Sissy and Pamela and one younger male bottle nose dolphin named Peter. All of them were taken from Marine Studios and had been co-starring in the television showFlipper. In 1964 the "Dolphinarium" was fully functional and as Lilly was often traveling he assigned Howe Lovatt to train the dolphins. The goal of the "Dolphinarium" experiment was to teach dolphins human language. Over a period of two years, Lilly and Howe Lovatt, both with very different approaches, tried to prove that human language could be mimicked by dolphins. Howe Lovatt reasoned that if she lived with the dolphins and made human-like sounds, similar to how a mother teaches her child to speak, they would have more success. She tried speaking slowly and changing the pitch of her tone to help Peter pronounce the words that she wanted him to learn. Howe Lovatt and the pubescent male dolphin Peter spent all their time together in the isolated "Dolphinarium" where Howe Lovatt documented Peter's progress with her twice-daily lessons and encouragement to say the words "Hello Margaret". According to Howe Lovatt, the "m" sound was extremely difficult for Peter to pronounce without making bubbles in the water. Howe Lovatt's experiments, and her relationship with Peter the dolphin, were documented in Christopher Riley's documentary The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins.
Complications
In week five Peter started to exhibit signs of sexual attraction toward Howe Lovatt. Howe Lovatt stated that it was not sexual on her part, but it allowed her to get to know Peter. An article titled "Interspecies Sex: Humans and Dolphins" appeared in the magazine Hustler that overdramatized the situation and reflected badly on their research. Other problems arose surrounding the project. In addition to her animal communication research, Lilly had been funded to research the effects of the drug LSD. He had been testing the effects of the drug on his subject dolphins, with no results. Since neither his communication experiments nor his LSD research was proving fruitful, Lilly's Dolphinarium eventually lost all funding. Due to the lack of funding, they moved to an abandoned bank building in Miami. Since the building lacked sunlight and space, Peter quickly deteriorated and later committed suicide.
Personal life
Margaret Howe Lovatt stayed on the island and married a photographer who took pictures of their research. They later moved back into the Dolphinarium and converted it into a family home. Together they had three daughters.
