Margaret Howe Lovatt

Margaret Howe Lovatt (; born 1942) is an American former volunteer naturalist from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. In the 1960s, she took part in a NASA-funded research project in which she attempted to teach a dolphin named Peter to understand and mimic human speech. As a child, she was inspired by a book called Miss Kelly, a story about a cat who communicated with humans. This inspired her to research teaching animals to speak human language.

Dolphinarium When she was in her early 20s, Lovatt lived on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where there was a laboratory to research dolphins. The director of the laboratory, Gregory Bateson, allowed her to observe dolphin behavior, and was impressed by her enthusiasm and diligence as an observer despite her lack of scientific training. While volunteering at the laboratory, she met John C. Lilly, a neuroscientist with the California Institute of Technology. He was building a research laboratory with funding from NASA and the United States Navy with the goal of speaking to extraterrestrial life forms. In order to simulate this situation, he built a "Dolphinarium", a dolphin-house flooded with water, on Saint Thomas. There Lilly accommodated three dolphins, two females named Sissy and Pamela and one younger male bottlenose dolphin named Peter. All of them were taken from Marine Studios and had been co-starring in the television show Flipper. In 1964, the "Dolphinarium" was fully functional, and as Lilly was often traveling, he assigned Lovatt to train the dolphins.

The goal of the "Dolphinarium" experiment was to teach dolphins human language. Over a period of two years, Lilly and Lovatt, both with very different approaches, tried to prove that human language could be mimicked by dolphins. Lovatt reasoned that if she lived with the dolphins and made human-like sounds, similar to how a mother teaches her child to speak, they would have more success. Lovatt and the pubescent male dolphin Peter spent all their time together in the isolated "Dolphinarium" where she documented Peter's progress with her twice-daily lessons and encouragement to say the words "Hello Margaret". According to Lovatt, the "m" sound was extremely difficult for Peter to pronounce without making bubbles in the water.

An article titled "Interspecies Sex: Humans and Dolphins" appeared in the magazine Hustler that dramatized the situation and reflected badly on their research.

Other problems arose surrounding the project. In addition to Lovatt's animal communication research, Lilly had been funded to research the effects of the drug LSD. Lilly had been testing the effects of the drug on subject dolphins, with no results. Since neither his communication experiments nor his LSD research were proving fruitful, Lilly's Dolphinarium eventually lost all funding. Due to the lack of funding, the dolphins were moved to a different facility in a repurposed bank building in Miami. The story is also mentioned in the Rick and Morty episode "Final DeSmithation".

Margaret Howe Lovatt was portrayed by Shiri Appleby in the "Drugs" episode of the TV series Drunk History, with an inebriated Duncan Trussell telling the story.

In Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Lovatt's involvement with Peter was mentioned during a story on Iran's so-called 'possession' of kamikaze dolphins.