In a story that makes me realise how dangerous a selfie combined with absolute ignorance for anything else that’s alive can be, a dolphin has died after a bunch of people dragged it onto a beach to get selfies with it and then didn’t bother throwing it back in the water. Pricks.

It went down over in the Argentinian beach resort of Santa Teresita in the north-eastern Buenos Aires Province, where some people found the rare La Plata dolphin – there are only 30,000 left in the world – washed up on the beach. Although they probably didn’t know that it could die very quickly once it was dehydrated, they all wanted a selfie with it before they just threw it back on the beach where they found it instead of returning it to the water.

They then continued to take pictures of its dead body lying in the sand. Fucking idiots.

Images VIA

The incident has prompted the Argentinian Wildlife Foundation to make the following statement about the dolphin, which is only found off the coast of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay and sometimes goes by the name of ‘The Franciscana dolphin’:

The Franciscana, like other species, cannot remain for much time outside of the water, it has thick fatty skin which gives it heat and means that taking it out of the water rapidly causes it to dehydrate and die.

This occasion serves to inform the public about the urgent necessity to return these dolphins to the sea as soon as possible if they find them on the shore. It is fundamental that people help to rescue these animals, because every Franciscana counts now.

So yeah, if you didn’t know about that then now you do. I would hope most people reading this would know better than to be such a complete and utter dickhead about something like this though.

On another note, remember the guy who had a sexual relationship with a dolphin and wrote a book about it?