Seth Lesser lifelong fascination with dolphins began when he first watched a dolphin show in Hawaii. This was reinforced when he visited Miami Seaquarium a few years later. However, even as a kid, Lesser had already shown signs of deep interest in animals and their behavior.
Lesser was fortunate to have grown up to a family that nurtured his love for animals. Born in Fresno, California, he had several pets as a kid, including 3 pairs of hamsters, a beagle, a parrot, and two cats, one being the Siamese cat he called “General”- his favorite. For Seth Lesser, however, keeping animals goes beyond giving them food or shelter, it is also a good opportunity to observe their behaviors.
That same interest and love for animals compelled him to graduate from the University of California with a degree in Animal Science, in preparation for establishing his own veterinary clinic. However, Seth Lesser’s fate was in training animals. He was drawn to Hawaii during the summer of 1992 to watch a dolphin show. He instantly fell for the dolphins’ aerial acrobatic skills and decided right there and then to become a dolphin trainer. Seth Lesser later landed a job at Dolphin Quest in California as dolphin trainer after taking some lessons at Moorpark College’s Exotic Animal Training and Management (EATM) Program.
After reading “Walden: Or Life in the Woods” half a century after the novel was published, Seth Lesser was inspired to follow the example set forth by Henry David Thoreau. Seth sought to live a simple life, testing his capacity for survival and self-sufficiency. He freed himself from the mundane details of life by retreating into the woods for some time.
Into an upper middle class family of lawyers in Charleston, West Virginia, the man who would follow Thoreau was born in December 2, 1885. Seth Lesser’s family had been moving among affluent circles since the beginning of the 19th century. His family expected him to become just like his father. Mr Lesser was expected to study at Princeton, get a law degree from Harvard and marry an equally wealthy young woman from Charleston. But reading Thoreau was a life-altering even for the young Lesser.
Seth Lesser’s mind was opened to the views of the great heavyweights in literature. For him, nothing compared to Thoreau. He toyed with the idea of living a simple life, if for a while. Seth developed a thirst for understanding the world; he wanted to understand his part in shaping it. And then he just did it: he secluded himself into the woods not far from the home of his family.
A changed man was what Seth Lesser’s family saw when he returned. He shocked his entire family when he announced that he would become a published writer instead of a lawyer like his father and like everyone else in his family. Though a Thoreau Mr Lesser was not, he became enriched by his experience. Turning him into a confident man who was set on his new course was his knowledge backed by experience that he could survive on his own without the trappings of modernity.
In 1689, Seth Lesser was among those who read the “1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery.” The document was written by members of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers. It heralded the first objection by a religious group against the slavery of African-Americans in what was then an English colony.
Seth Lesser was a wealthy landowner who inherited thousands of acres of plantation land from his father, the Atlanta cotton plantation owner, Hartford Lesser. Like all plantation owners who needed a lot of people to run his farmlands, he relied on slave labor in tending to his cotton plantations. After reading the Quaker document, he began feeling the first pangs of class guilt. Of his own accord, he gradually freed his slaves.
Those who chose to not to claim their freedom, and there were many, benefitted from the reforms Seth Lesser began to introduce, such as 12 hours of fixed work, education and social welfare benefits. He gave them small plots of land to tend to, from which they harvested their own means of sustenance. Soon, news of his kind treatment of his slaves spread all over Georgia, earning him the hatred of his fellow plantation owners.
Though Seth Lesser was well-loved by his slaves, he met an untimely death — an unintended consequence of his kind deeds. Owners of plantations around his property banded together in their common hatred of him. In the wee hours of June 1851, the people whom he thought were his friends broke into his property and murdered him. They executed all the slaves they found on his property and burned down his plantation to the ground.