Cole spends much of his free time swimming with dolphins, and he has enough perspective to realize that this makes him, by most people's standards, eccentric. He doesn't mind. With excitable gray eyes and long brown hair in ringlets, he looks a little like a youthful Michael Bolton. For about two decades, physical therapists and psychologists have argued that swimming with dolphins can help the sick and handicapped. Dolphin-assisted therapy seems to accelerate the vocal and physical development of autistic and mentally retarded children, for example.
Some researchers claim that dolphin swims also boost the human immune system.
But Cole doesn't buy this conventional wisdom. He rejects the idea that dolphins make humans feel better simply by making them happy. That's what clowns are for. Cole believes that swimming with dolphins can have a profound physiological effect on humans. To the layperson, all this might sound a little nutty.