What makes them different is their humanity. They are born with inalienable rights.
No...Humans have gone to war a few times for rights that you could call inalienable rights...rights which did not exist for the first 50,000 years of man's existence, and not for 2000 year before Christ to 1700 years after it...except sporadically for a few years at a time.
War or it's threat is what grants rights...historically.
Dolphins are animals plain and simple and are food for some animals and humans. Until they can declare their humanity they are animals are should be treated that way, which is better than they are being treated now.
There are a great many tribes of humans still living in the world today, that would be unable to declare their "humanity" or self awareness to you--due to language barriers, and due also to many human tribes not being able to write or read. A declaration in writing, is NOT relevant to the right to life of jungle tribes people...or to dolphin pods...
For all you know..dolphins may have songs which herald those that came before them, in a history they tell by song....as you may recall this sort of thing in the history of Norse Tribes of man....or Greek. The concept of having scribes put this down on paper, came hundreds or thousands of years after there was a long standing tradition of telling the stories of the past.
We know dolphins teach other dolphins, and share ideas...We know they possess a complex language they speak many times faster than our own( can relay complex thoughts much faster than we can), and that they have their own alphabet.
For all we know, dolphins may have a complex history they pass on to all pod members, via song or equivalent storytelling.
Surely you won't suggest that there was no such thing as a human, prior to written language??? Or that tribal people today without written language are appropriate targets for Japanese eating habits?
Think about that what you posted that XXX was written by humans. Just what profound wisdoms have dolphins recorded for prosperity? None because they are animals.
We pass on information quite slowly by verbal means....and have issues in mass dissemination. If YOU could tell the complex story of
the Iliad and the Odyssey ....what had actually been an Oral tradition for many centuries...if you could do this entire story orally in 5 minutes, and the alternative of reading it in a book would take 8 hours.....which would be the higher level process? My point ( granted with exaggeration), is that our oral communication may be so defective and slow, that we were forced to develop a written language. The dolphin languge, which I understand to run at about 8 to 10 times the speed ours does, may also have it's own version of the story telling need--being some form of dolphin song that eclipses even normal dolphin speed of communication....we just don't know...and people like yourself apparently would not care.....And please read this again....if in fact, it was discovered that dolphins do pass on their histories with songs the equivalent of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in minutes compared to our days....then would you consider that maybe Dolphins should be treated differently than food animals?