Dolphins have been granted ‘non-human personhood’ status by the government of India, making India the first nation in the world to recognize the unique intelligence and self-awareness of the cetacean order (a class of aquatic mammals).

The decision was announced by India’s Minister of the Environment and Forests which also outlawed captive dolphin shows. The ministry added that dolphins ‘should have their own specific rights.’ (SOURCE)

Dolphins are extremely intelligent mammals with a highly-developed social structure. Recent research shows that dolphins call each other by name and can remember the unique name whistles from old ‘friends’ heard just one time 20 years ago.

Dolphins choose their own unique name — a series of complex whistles — before they reach one year of age. From that point forward, all the other dolphins in their social group call them by that unique name.
Dolphins use highly-complex grammatical communications

Previous research has shown that dolphins have human-like self awareness and engage in highly complex communications with other dolphins using grammatical sentence structure. Yes, dolphins have their own complete language, much like humans. (See the Dolphin Communication Project.) The main difference between dolphin language and human language is that dolphins aren’t vaccinated as young children and injected with […]