We all like to go to the beach when we're on holiday and Dony is the same. Except every day is holiday for him...!
We were delighted to receive a report from an English family who had encountered Dony while on holiday in France at the end of June. At the same time as the local newspapers were reporting an aggressive dolphin which people should avoid at all costs, Claire Williams, her partner Clive Davies and his 12 year old daughter Caroline were enjoying a wonderful and peaceful interaction on the beach at Raguenes, near Nevez in southern Brittany. This occurred on the 24th June in the early evening. As soon as they arrived on the beach and saw the dolphin in shallow water (less than 1m), Claire was heading for the water – luckily already dressed for the occasion in her bikini (dream on, Irish holidaymakers!) – and was soon fulfilling a lifetime ambition of swimming with a wild dolphin. Caroline soon joined her, while the men of the family were less well prepared for the water and had to watch from the shore! However, that was good too as Clive and his son fetched the video camera from the car and got some great footage, from which these stills are taken.
Claire writes: “We would love you to use the photos on the website, especially to show people that Dony isn’t the aggressive dolphin he is sometimes made out to be. Dony was extremely friendly, rolling over, letting us tickle his belly and really enjoying all the attention he was getting. The encounter we had with Dony really made our holiday.”
Adding Claire’s report to similar ones from local swimmers Gilles Le Guénan, Ronan Tanguy and Christophe Bernard, and with the evidence of numerous accounts of friendly interactions with Dony, who is so obviously a dolphin who seeks out and desires human company, for whatever strange reasons, one has to ask oneself who or what is driving the media agenda to paint Dony as a dangerous dolphin. The article reproduced below from a local French paper Le Telegramme relies heavily on spokespeople from Océanopolis, a ‘marine discovery park’ at Brest, which of course keeps captive animals (not dolphins at present) and like many such institutions today has a hand in the rescue and treatment of stranded marine mammals in the area. Hopefully there is no hidden agenda here to portray Dony as dangerous so that he can be ‘rescued’ and taken into ‘protective custody’. Alarmist? Maybe; but this very thing was suggested by representatives of the French dolphinarium industry when Dony was in England in 2002, and a capture was actually attempted by a team from a Dutch dolphinarium when Dony was off the coast of Holland last winter!
NB - In France, 'Dony' is known to the general public (who have not visited irishdolphins.com!) as 'Randy' - another unfortunate case of humans projecting their ideas onto dolphins!
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