Junior

[lamont]

Did a dive today in cove2. Junior was around and did a couple of interesting things.

The first odd thing he did was we watched him (viz was real good) bite one of the lines to the buoys and then roll himself up a revolution or two in the cord. If I was junior's mom, I think I would have yelled at junior for doing that. I was considering how the hell I was going to rescue an entangled seal without getting myself killed when he just spun back around and disentagled himself and swam away. Kinda freaked me out though in terms of being concerned about him...

The other thing is that he would come up and grab my buddy's fin and leg and wrap himself around it and hang on. He did this multiple times. He wasn't aggressive at all. No biting, no scratching, nothing else. It really puzzled us what to do about this. My buddy just hung there motionless with no reaction until junior let go. It was pretty much cute and adorable on the face of it, but we were having conversations about what to do about it, and the fact that we don't want him to grow into a 200+ lbs behemoth that has the same fearlessness towards divers and might do some real damage... I don't know what else we could have done other than try to minimize the encounter by not reacting and encouraging him... Thoughts?

 

[recdiver]

You did the right thing. Nothing.

 

[SeanQ]

I agree with recdiver.

In the not too distant future, Junior will cease to be a young, rambunctious, playful seal pup and become an older, rambunctious, playful, seal that is several hundred pounds heavier and much stronger. Junior could inadvertantly cause serious harm to a diver even though he is "just playing".

How do you change an animal's disposition to humans without harming them? It's a difficult thing to do once an animal has grown accustomed to humans. By not reacting, hopefully Junior will become bored with those silly humans that strap metal tanks to their backs.