Can dolphins be bored? For sure they can! And they don't like it anymore than we do. In dolphinaria this is gratefully exploited. If a dolphin does not want to do a trick it's simply put in solitary confinement. That'll teach it.
If a dolphin can be bored, it also can have something to do: engage itself in meaningful activity. This is not so hard to imagine for dolphins that live in a pod and there's extensive research on that. But how is this with a solitary dolphin like Dusty? Is she bored and therefore comes to people? Or has she plenty to do for herself and are we more of a hobby to her? After all, she has to fend for herself and does not have the benefit and involvement of pod dolphins. But when her hunger is satisfied and her safety at rest, what does she do and what does she think about? What does she do in her 'free time', particularly in winter, when she gets little human attention?
I used to joke that in wintertime Dusty is watching, and especially listening to videos inside her head of the beautiful moments last summer she had with humans.
But thinking she does too, and in those cases we think to understand we call her intelligent. That actually suggests that she can do and think more than we can understand and that is because we can't do what she can.
By reconstructing myself as a dolphin, with a monofin for a fluke, a waterwing instead of pectoral fins and rigged with a dorsal fin I have learned a few things about a dolphin's know-how. For instance that I can push off the monofin against the waterwing, but also that I can push off the waterwing against the monofin. And when I do that simultaneously a stability occurs, a balance that results from synchronised movement fore and aft. Where we keep our balance in vertical bearings, dolphins do so in the horizontal. Our balance lies, say between our shoulders, theirs is between the pectoral fins and the fluke. In locomotion we walk in left-right, they swim in fore-aft. Like we swim in crawl while they swim in dolphin-kick. Moreover, dolphins experience gravity in a very different way and their spatial orientation is three-dimensional. This can't but have its consequences in mental capacity.
Although the intelligence of dolphins is heavily anecdoted, there is little structural knowledge about their actual thinking. This in fact is permeated with modern lore and speculative make-believe and wishful thinking. If the recent prediction of Denise Herzing that in five years we can talk with dolphins comes true, it maybe rather a showdown what they have to tell us. And that doesn't even mean we can understand them. I think dolphins are far too clever to let us sort them out. In sociology there is the concept of the 'interaction-effect': when an interviewee suspects that he will be placed in a not desired category, he will try, if need be with false answers, to avoid this.
In Dingle in the evening we often had for real conferences about what Fungi meant with certain behaviour. When the next day we tried to test our theories on him, he would do something totally unexpected, as if he could read our thoughts. The spirit of freedom cannot be captured by scientific colonialism. She is unfathomable by nature and therefore invincible, because she cannot be grasped by those who want to possess her.
And if you do not want to believe me, check out these videos in which a worn-out scientist resigns to the elusiveness of his subjects, dolphins that are poking fun and laughing into his face.
1-http://youtu.be/7lfrCS5mOJU
2-http://youtu.be/AHUuX_rBuJE
3-http://youtu.be/TunTB8TwiN4