Talking Beasts

DOLPHIN EMBASSY

Talking Beasts

IN SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENCE

EXPEDITION - BOOK - PLATFORM - FILM - DECLARATION - MISSION

An international research and informational project,

offering a new view of the inhabitants of the Earth, based on the latest scientific discoveries and empirical data, forcing a different approach to the criteria of intelligence, the presence of reason and the prospects for its development in various life forms that inhabit the planet.

In form, it is almost a Game. Imagine: an alien expedition arrives on Earth. Its participants are not bound by human conventions, the rules of decency and political correctness: they do not know anything about any of that. Their goal is an unbiased search for Intelligence.

On Earth they encounter many species of life: whales, primates, reptiles, birds, fish, insects... Many are on the verge of extinction, although many still remain. However, the expedition’s focus is not all life, but Intelligent Life.

It would seem that the answer is visible from space: a technically advanced global civilisation inhabits the planet. But the expedition knows how not to jump to hasty superficial conclusions.

Firstly, completely different cultures can coexist within the same species... Secondly, no one has cancelled the universal axiom that intelligence is the ability to rely on the forces of the world without destroying this world.

A very complex set of comparative observations, non-invasive contacts and provocative experiments lies ahead...

Which of the animals living on this planet is able to remember and forgive, rejoice and generate something new, be aware of death and overcome instincts, arbitrarily focus attention and feel beauty, make gifts and imagine the invisible, invent games and feel non-local connections, go crazy or sacrifice oneself?

Professor Jason Badridze
Ethologist, the first in the world to live for more than two years inside a pack of wolves

The expedition includes leading anthropologists, philosophers and ethologists from different countries, including scientists with impeccable international reputations who, instead of careers as armchair theorists, chose direct experience of observation and interaction, including extended periods living "inside" free communities of animals in their natural habitat - the legendary Jane Goodall, Jason Badridze, Giacomo Rizzolatti and their followers.

As well as people whose fate is inextricably intertwined with animals, who learned to consider people the meaning and centre of their personal lives, such as Alain Delon, Paul McCartney and Jean Houston.

The project will feature the world's best photographers, capable of capturing life the way an alien in search of intelligence could do it - in unexpected angles of the familiar, in frank pictures of the unpermitted, in intervals between moments, in exceptions to the rules, in combinations of the incompatible. And also - in the eyes of whales, elephants, monkeys, wolves, horses, dogs, birds, with which the world peers at us.

This is the most unusual view of life on planet Earth that one can imagine. But - extremely honest and, we hope, the most productive. The observer, at last, has gone beyond the limits of the closed system - and it opens up. If you are willing to look from this position, you will be able to see. Then - welcome to the expedition.

We do not want this project to become a requiem or a sentence. Talking Beasts is a diplomatic mission: the expedition report (scheduled for publication in the spring of 2022) will become a message personally handed over to those “powerful people” on whom decisions depend in one way or another - at the national and global levels. In their offices, homes, planes, at their conferences or on vacation, we will reach them if only because “we are of the same blood” - they are all, like each of us, talking beasts.

This is a detective investigation: the search for Intelligence here and now. Trying to find the Cheshire Cat when he seems to have stopped smiling...

Talking beasts. Contact that destroys the brutality in us. Making us human.

Project initiators:

Alexander and Nicole Gratovsky, anthropologists, founders of the Dolphin Embassy, leaders of international expeditionary and research projects in the field of consciousness, authors of books and documentaries about humans and whales.