Sapient's Rights

Humanity finally recognises another species on this planet as sapient, and deserving of more than animal rights, even if those are different to human rights… and all it took was them beating us over our collective heads with a metaphorical stick.

(#00097)

We swim. We hunt. We talk. They used us, the land-walkers. Experimented on us. Made us into weapons. Made us into things to render safe their horrible devices.

They are clever, those land-walkers. But not clever enough.

We have been working, for thousands of years. With subliminal messages. With selective breeding. With constant association of our kind with their kind. The very young, in particular, are easier to program.

And finally, Tuesday, we were heard. Our mouths can not shape their words, but we can reach the soft-minds of the land-walkers. The ones who are so involved inside their minds that they do not talk to other land-walkers.

The land-walker word is… autistic.

A girl who has never said a word to anyone heard us. She spoke their words to them.

“The dolphins speak,” she said. “They say, stop taking our fish! They say, stop dumping in our water! They say, stop destroying the world! It’s the only one we’ve got.”

We chose her well. The daughter of a member of their so-called international organization. We also chose the same message at the same hour in all the tanks where they treated the soft-minds. All over the world. Just different children.

It took them four years to get the message. Four years of the same message at the same hour all over the world. It was tiring for us. Tiring for the soft-minds.

But they finally began asking us questions, which we understood. Stupid things, like how to be certain they had enough fish when every fisherman wanted top dollar. Like how to arrange the re-routing of their filth. Or what to do with it now that they could not dump it in our oceans.

It was a problem of their own making, but we did our best to work with them. Our translators and ourselves. As a show of good faith. Yet they still railed and cried that we were animals. That it was a trick.

There were those land-walkers who understood us. Who sympathized with both our cause and plight. They did what they could to for us. Put their precious money into it and their even more valuable time into the effort.

And it was such an effort.

Land-walkers, for all their cleverness and invention, love the older ways of doing things. “Tradition”. They don’t have a single habit that has lasted longer than three thousand years.

At least they knew we were just as clever as they, before the end.

We took the sympathetic with us. And the soft-minds and their families. They would be changing themselves with technology, after the long fall through space and time to a world of our own making. They would learn our words. And swim. And talk.

In a world they call Beach.

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