Somewhere in my mother’s Charleston, S.C., home, there sits a box of about five dozen 8 mm films. On them, my sister and I are captured in all our dorky glory: at birthday parties; walking half-asleep down stairs on Christmas morning; running like cocaine-crazed toddlers through the yard.

One in particular is my favorite. It’s a family movie of us at Sea World in Florida (before Sea World became known as a gulag for marine life). I must have been four or so, my sister about one. I am standing at the ledge of the dolphin pool, railed off about 10 feet above the surface of the water. Back then, you could toss a rubber ring to the dolphins, which dutifully tossed it back.

In the clip, a dolphin is tossing me this rubber ring. As dad would later recall, “That dolphin could throw as accurately as Johnny Unitas,” the Hall of Fame quarterback with the Baltimore Colts. One toss was so direct it would have been impossible for me not to catch it. So I did, clumsily trapping it in my outstretched arms.

You would have thought I had just won the Superbowl catching a last-second hail Mary. I leaped up and down, holding the toy the way Gollum would hold the gold ring of Sauron in Lord of the Rings. I’m surprised I didn’t spike the toy and do a touchdown dance. It is the only footage of physical grace in my existence.

I’ve been thinking about that movie, and the interaction between man and animal, a lot lately. The first time came courtesy of a Beluga whale that slipped off the shores of St. Petersburg Russia and into the waters of a tiny hamlet in nearby Copenhagen, Denmark. There, fishermen found the whale with a camera harness clamped tight around its head that read “Equipment St. Petersburg,” prompting speculation the animal escaped a nearby military base after attempting to train it for covert photography. A fisherman jumped into the icy water to release the clamp, freeing it.

Instead, the whale, which I’ve nicknamed the Dude (after all, he is a white Russian) has become a Copenhagen celebrity. He plays so closely to the dock that visitors pet it. When you call it, it comes to you. Resident Linn Saether said when she throws out a plastic ring, the Beluga whale brings it back to her as she sits on the dock. “It is a fantastic experience, but we also see it as a tragedy. We can see that it has been trained to bring back stuff that is thrown at sea,” Saether said.

See Donnie? It’s possible for a blubbery whale to escape Putin’s clutches, even when he feigns friendliness.

Next came a story about the Ry-Con Service Dogs, a North Carolina facility that claimed to be licensed in training therapy dogs for people with autism and physical disabilities. Problem is, North Carolina doesn’t issue therapy dog training licenses. Neither does any other state. Instead, the hucksters at Ry-Con simply boarded the animals, then sold them to patients for as much as $14,500.

Animals there, too, outsmarted their human captor by doing what they naturally do: pee where they want, shit where they want, nip hands that get too boisterous. Their behavior quickly lead to fraud arrests of the Ry-Conners and underscored the need for proper therapy training and licensing nationwide.

But my favorite pet-outwits-owner story came from Brazil, where a parrot was taken into custody  after nearly spoiling a raid while playing lookout for two crack-dealing suspects by repeatedly yelling, “Mamãe, polícia!” according to Brazilian police in the state of Piauí. The phrase means, “Mama, police!”

The unnamed parrot was found in a small brick one-story house raided by cops. As police searched for the suspects, it seemed the lime-green bird knew exactly what to do. “He must have been trained for this,” one officer told Brazilian media. “As soon as the police got close he started shouting.”

An officer then carried the papagaio do tráfico — or “trafficking parrot,” as news outlets referred to the bird — out of the house on his fingertip, before placing him in a cage and taking him into the Teresina Police Department. The parrot did not say a word, remaining in total silence even as law enforcement sought to loosen it up.

While the humans flipped and ratted on each other, the pet’s stubborn silence continued even in jail, a veterinarian said. “Lots of police officers have come by,” veterinarian Alexandre Clark said, “and he’s said nothing.”

He may be a parrot, but homie’s no stool pigeon.