“It was very precious. It was very gentle,” Margaret Howe says of the relationship she had with Peter, a bottlenose dolphin.
According to a new BBC documentary The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, neurologist John C. Lilly ran a NASA-funded experiment in the 1960s to teach a 6-year-old bottlenose dolphin, Peter, to speak English.
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His assistant was 23-year-old Margaret Howe, who lived on Saint Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands with Peter. They would eat, sleep, and play together in complete isolation.
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"Peter liked to be … with me," Howe says in the documentary. Eventually she said she began to have a sexual relationship with Peter, because otherwise he wouldn't pay attention to her lessons.
As for how that might work, the documentary tells Howe would relieve Peter's desires herself manually.
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"He would rub himself up on my knee, or my foot, or my hand, or whatever," Howe revealed. "And I allowed that — I wasn't uncomfortable with that, as long as it wasn't too rough."
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