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 show Flipper. 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.



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