Animals are so cool.
I was just down in the Keys. The island we stay on is Duck Key... there is a resort on a tiny island that is right next to us that has a dolphin encounter thing. Their enclosure for the dolphins is actually just a fenced-in cage like thing that is located in a flow through canal. I take our boat through this canal on my way to the marina whenever I need to fuel up.
We take friends along this canal all the time and they are always amazed to see the dolphins in this enclosure. We take our boat right up along side it and you can see the dolphins perfectly... they are very very close to you. The thing is... no matter how much the girls on the boat call to and make every sound known to mankind in order to get the attention of the dolphins... they totally ignore people. I mean it's like we're not even there.
Our old dog Harley used to love checking out these dolphins. He had a very loud and annoying bark since he was a schnauzer. When he got excited, his bark was almost like a scream. Whenever he would see the dolphins in this enclosure he would start in with his annoying barking. The dolphins would come right up and stare at him for as long as we would stay next to their enclosure. We always thought that his bark was the reason for the dolphins' interest since they always totally ignored all the people on the boat no matter how much noise we made.
Well, this year Judah went back down there for the 2nd time. Judah does not have an annoying bark at all. He is pretty quiet and only barks when he is alerting us that someone is at the door or if something out of the norm gets his attention and he thinks he should alert us. He is not a barker.
When we pulled up along side the enclosure with Judah... he didn't make one sound. But guess what???... the dolphins all came up and just stared at him like he was the most interesting thing they had ever seen. We let them stare at each other for probably around 30 minutes. Those dolphin never took their eyes off of Judah... and Judah was staring right back. He never barked once. It was really amazing to me to see the interest those dolphins had in Judah... I could see the wheels turning in their eyes. I wonder what they were thinking!
I snapped this pic of them staring at each other. I think they would have stared at Judah nonstop until the sun went down if we stayed there that long. It is really something to see.
