The Cove (2009)

John Potter: Self - Underwater Acoustics Consultant

Quotes 

• John Potter : It sometimes amazes me that the only language which has been extensively taught to dolphins is a version of American Sign Language, which, of course, you use your hands, so you have all these wonderful signals, and people use their hands to give messages to dolphins. And this somehow kind of misses the point because dolphins don't have hands, so this is inherently a very one-way process. And it's this anthropomorphic, "We have something to teach them or control them," and perhaps we ought to be looking at what they can give to us.

• John Potter : As a scientist, I'm trained to recognize intelligence through objective measures... tool use, cognitive processes, and so on. As a human being, when I see a dolphin looking at me and his eyes tracking me and I lock eyes with that animal, there's a human response that makes it undeniable that I'm connecting with an intelligent being.