After about five years as a trainer, I reached a point where I was feeling confident in my knowledge and skills and I visited a dolphin facility and watched one of their shows. The trainer was narrating the show while training two bottlenose dolphins. At the start of the show she introduced her two dolphins to the audience while reaching out to touch each animal’s pec fin. The behavior was identical to the behavior I had trained and seen performed thousands of times. The only difference was that this trainer blew her whistle late!

In Animal Training: Successful Animal Management through Positive Reinforcement, I recount the story of Zsa Zsa, a bottlenose dolphin who was accidentally presented with a cue she had not seen in over a decade, yet she performed the behavior perfectly. That experience had several of us wondering just how good a dolphin’s memory might be.