L ike most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. In her early 20s, living on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, they took on a new significance. During Christmas , her brother-in-law mentioned a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to pay the lab a visit early the following year.

It's a weird, weird world we live in; and this story does nothing to dispel that claim. A woman has had sex with a dolphin. Genuinely, seriously, literally, and all the other adverbs you can think of. So far, so bizarre.

Margaret Howe Lovatt tried to teach Peter the dolphin how to speak English but their relationship progressed to a whole new level. A woman who had sex with a dolphin as part of a scientific study has spoken out for the first time. During the swinging 60s, animal researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt was part of a Nasa-funded experiment on the US Virgin Islands to teach the intelligent sea creatures how to speak English. In she helped turn a house into a domestic dolphinarium by flooding it with knee-deep water, where researchers could study the animals from their home. It was there she met Peter, an adolescent dolphin she described as 'sexually coming of age'.

Margaret Howe Lovatt born Margaret C. Howe, in is a volunteer naturalist from Saint Thomas, U. Virgin Islands. In the s, 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.