Dolphins have been known to push a mattress quite empty of human beings for considerable distances at sea. Possibly it is merely the pushing that interests them, and not the saving of any human beings that might be atop of them.
Is there any evidence that dolphins save drowning swimmers? There is.
In 1945 the wife of a well-known trial attorney residing in Florida was saved from drowning by a dolphin.[3] This woman had stepped into a sea with a strong undertow and was immediately dragged under. Just before losing consciousness, she remembers hoping that someone would push her ashore. “With that, someone gave me a tremendous shove, and I landed on the beach, face down, too exhausted to turn over ... when I did, no one was near, but in the water almost eighteen feet out a porpoise was leaping around, and a few feet beyond him another large fish was also leaping.”
In this case the porpoise was almost certainly a dolphin and the large fish a fishtail shark. A man who had observed the events from the other side of a fence told the rescued woman that this was the second time he had seen a drowning person saved by a “porpoise.”
More recently, on the night of February 29, 1960, Mrs. Yvonne M. Bliss of Stuart fell from a boat off the east coast of Grand Bahama Island in the West Indies.[4] “After floating, swimming, shedding more clothing for what seemed an eternity, I saw a form in the water to the left of me.... It touched the side of my hip and, thinking it must be a shark, I moved over to the right to try to get away from it.... This change in my position was to my advantage as heretofore I was bucking a cross tide and the waves would wash over my head and I would swallow a great deal of water. This sea animal which I knew by this time must be a porpoise had guided me so that I was being carried with the tide.
“After another eternity and being thankful that my friend was keeping away the sharks and barracuda for which these waters are famous, the porpoise moved back of me and came around to my right side. I moved over to give room to my companion and later knew that had not the porpoise done this, I would have been going downstream to deeper and faster moving waters. The porpoise had guided me to the section where the water was the most shallow.
“Shortly I touched what felt like fish netting to my feet. It was seaweed and under that the glorious and most welcome bottom.
“As I turned toward shore, stumbling, losing balance, and saying a prayer of thanks, my rescuer took off like a streak on down the channel.”
The reader must be left to make what he can of such occurrences. Dr. George G. Goodwin of the American Museum of Natural History doubts the intention of dolphins to save drowning persons.[5] “Anything floating,” he writes, “on or near the surface of the sea will attract his attention. His first action on approaching the object of his curiosity is to roll under it. In doing so, something partly submerged, like the body of a drowning person, is nudged to the surface of the water. The sea does its part and automatically drives floating objects toward the beach.” This may well be so in some cases, but it is an explanation which does not fit the incidents described by Mrs. Bliss, in which she was not pushed but guided. Occam’s razor should not be too bluntly applied.
The cooperativeness of dolphins with fishermen in various parts of the world has gone on for several thousand years without its significance having registered much upon the consciousness of the rest of the world—including the learned and the scientific.