Dolphins are still used there now as "part of our security force," Haley told Business Insider. One concern, according to a PBS Frontline chronology on military dolphins, was that the dolphins could be harmed by working in waters much colder than in their native environment.Īfter a three-and-a-half year process, the Navy was cleared in 2009 to send dolphins to Washington state, which it did starting in May 2010, according to Navy spokesman Chris Haley.
In the late 1980s, environmentalists and animal rights activists forced the Navy to drop its use of surveillance dolphins at a submarine base hosting a huge stockpile of nuclear warheads near Seattle, Washington. The dolphins' transportation and treatment is cause for concern for animal rights groups. And four Ukrainian military dolphins had actually ben sold to Iran and transported by air in 2000, according to the BBC. In any case, Russia helped itself to Ukraine's stable of combat dolphins after Moscow took over Crimea. Just a few years ago, Ukraine restarted training the animals for military purposes, though it may have been close to phasing it back out just before Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula last year. "Once the dolphin has tracked you down, it butts you the needle shoots out and pokes you, creating an embolism." Trainers used the mammals "to track down enemy divers, outfitting them with a device strapped onto the head that contains a compressed gas needle," Webb writes. In his memoir on life as a Navy SEAL, Brandon Webb writes about a training exercise in San Diego to evade enemy military dolphins. When a dolphin finds one, the animals swim back to their trainers, who might give them a transponder to drop near the mine in order to flag its location.īut dolphins can also be trained to kill, according to one persistent rumor surrounding the Navy's Marine Mammal Program.
This makes dolphins especially useful for identifying underwater mines. That gives them an idea of their surroundings, and even lets them figure out what kind of metal they might be swimming near, according to a program spokesperson speaking with National Geographic News. "The reason they're used is that they have abilities that are unmatched still by anything man-made," Budzyna said.ĭolphins emit vocalizations and then closely listen for how the sounds bounce back. The sea mammals make attractive military assets because of their intelligence and trainability - as well as their speed in the water, and an echolocation ability that far outperforms the best electronic competitors. A bottlenose dolphin named K-Dog leaps out of the water in front of Sergeant Andrew Garrett while training near the USS Gunston Hall in the Persian Gulf on March 18, 2003.
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