Another "Is a Dolphin a Person?" + My Two Cents

In response to a trial of two men tried for releasing bottlenose dolphins used for experiments, Midgley explores whether dolphins can be considered as persons. She first cites the Oxford Dictionary definition of a person which states that a person is a "a character or personage acted, one who plays or performs any part, a character, relation, or capacity in which one acts, a being having legal rights, a juridical person." She then deliberates the role of intelligence in whether or not non-humans can be considered persons. Scopes of intelligence she is interested in include whether or not they can talk, reason, or suffer, the last of which is relevant as the dolphins were testified as living in deleterious conditions. Lastly, she cites that the most important factor of determining whether or not nonhumans can be considered persons is emotional fellowship, or specifically, whether or not they share the trait of being sensitive, social, and emotionally complex. I believe her argument is mostly that dolphins are a lot more humanlike than we previously believed and that we need to redefine how we express our relationships with the nonhuman world.

I'd like to point out that the issue of advocating for dolphins in captivity is not as easy as liberating all the dolphins. I think it should be evaluated on a case by case basis since each animal is different. To provide more context, it's important to understand that dolphins are learning based animals: they operate on very little instinct and learn by observation and experience. As such, the reason why capturing wild dolphins is considered cruel is because it takes dolphins that are used to living in the ocean, fending for themselves, and companions and forces them to adapt to a controlled environment with walls, constantly interacting with humans for food, attention, exercise, etc., and an artificial social group. So it's not so much the fact that they are losing their "freedom", it's more so that they are being forced to adapt. The same concept holds true if you take animals that are used to adjusted to their predetermined social groups, regularly participate in human interaction, and are used to a confined space and move them elsewhere (ie another facility, sea pen "retirement", or flat out tossing them back into the ocean). I also think it should that adaptability should be considered as well. Some species of dolphins adapt better than others regardless of size and intelligence. For example, a smaller species of dolphin, the spinner dolphin, has had much poorer survivability in captivity than the larger bottlenose dolphin, whose average lifespans in captivity are comparable to that of their wild counterparts.  This is mostly related to their natural history: bottlenose dolphins in shallower water and can adapt better to shallow tank worlds whereas spinner dolphins have evolved to be constantly traveling the open ocean.
So I think a more accurate question to ask would be "Is this specific animal adapting well to human care?"