Should animals, especially dolphins, be used to treat human disorders such as depression, bipolarity or mental retardation? There are many questions about this issue regarding effectiveness, ethics, safety, and costs. “Swimming with dolphins” could be a life-changing event, because it can “help cure disorders such as depression, Down syndrome, epilepsy, and AIDS” (Herzog 19). People pay a lot of money to have their children or other family members spend time with these creatures hoping they can help. In some cases, it is a last ditch effort to help their children in some way. The end result of swimming with dolphins is not what people would expect. Studies have shown that dolphin therapy does little to help treat these diseases and disorders. It is also not right to hold these animals against their will and force them to do things that are not part of their natural habitat. Even though dolphins appear to be calm and fun animals to swim with, they can still become dangerous and injure anyone who comes near them. Dolphins should not be used for therapeutic purposes because they have been shown to provide little or no help to the person undergoing therapy; It is not moral to force an animal to do what it was not intended to do when it was born into the world, which is why it can lead to safety issues for all parties involved. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Dolphin therapy has not lived up to expectations or proven effective in helping humans with certain ailments. Studies conducted to prove the effectiveness of dolphin therapy have proven to be invalid. “German scientists observed sessions between people with mental problems and dolphins during their therapy sessions and the results concluded that most of the time the dolphins ignored the children.” (Herzog 19), and an even greater perdition made by Lori Marino and Scott Lilienfeld. Marino has been studying dolphins for more than twenty years and Lilienfeld is a clinical psychologist. Together they evaluated whether dolphin therapy had an effect on humans. After running numerous experiments, they found numerous errors in everyone they examined, such as the same sample size, lack of objective measures of improvement, inadequate control groups, and researchers' conflict of interest. Lori Marino and Scott Lilienfeld together concluded that there is no good evidence to say that dolphin therapy is effective. To support their conclusion “dolphin therapy is an unregulated industry, not certified or approved by any recognizable psychological or medical organization” (Herzog 22), because there is no concrete evidence to give this type of therapy a reason to be recognized or certified. If all these studies have proven that dolphin therapy is effective, then why has no one certified or licensed it? Dolphin therapy has not produced results good enough to be recognized. (Herzog 18-22). Would you like to be held against your will and forced to do something that is familiar to you? Dolphins in the United States are usually born in captivity, but in other places in the world they are captured. After being captured, they are forced to undergo rigorous training to become therapy animals. This training is very dangerous to the health of the dolphin and can even result in the death of the dolphin, “seven dolphins die for every dolphin that comes to a Guantánamo cetacean” (Herzog 22). 23).