The Dolphins were rescued for a reason

[Osiris]

They were scared of these guys:
Dolphin assassins menace Gulf of Mexico


By Thomas C Greene in Washington

Heavily-armed, frightened, and confused. No, we don't mean the Bush Administration, but a group of killer dolphins trained by the US Navy and lately washed into the Gulf of Mexico by Hurricane Katrina, if The Guardian is to be believed.



According to an Observer report by Mark Townsend Houston, Navy dolphins trained to shoot suspected terrorist frogmen with narcotic dart guns mounted on their heads have gone over the top, and may be menacing divers, and perhaps nice dolphins like the ones recently found cowering near their former pens at the Marine Life Oceanarium in Gulfport, Mississippi. No wonder they were so frightened.
The evidence for this report is the loose speculation of one Leo Sheridan - "a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry" - who, we are told, "had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming that dolphins had escaped."

"If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber, and if [the animals are] equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire," Sheridan told the Observer. "The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?" he fretted.

Worrying to be sure. We find, however, that Sheridan has made sport of gullible reporters in the past. In 2003, he was confident that he and a team of divers he advised had located the site where English aviator Amy Johnson died, after her plane went into the sea off Kent in 1941. The Guardian carried that item too. Not surprisingly, there has been little news about Johnson's plane since the announcement.

He also appears to have been confident, back in 1998, that a group of US Navy killer dolphins had come to grief off the French Mediterranean coast when they got loose and their handlers detonated a "radio-controlled explosion of their signal collars, so that no one could find out their missions." (Find out their missions?)

Now, admittedly, the US Navy does use trained dolphins, by its own admission. They're useful for mine detection and for locating suspected enemy swimmers, rescuing friendly swimmers, and the like. But we find ourselves persuaded by the Navy's explanation that dolphins, being an alien species with an entirely different sensory and cognitive apparatus, are ill equipped to detect and process the subtle signals that humans use to distinguish between friend and foe, and are therefore unsuited to search-and-destroy missions.

But dolphin assassins would make great fodder for a B-movie suspense script.

Oops, sorry; that's been done. ®





-Yahoo News

[Lara]

What the?*!* Is this for real or is this the kind of American humour I don't understand?

[shev]

HAHA. best story ever.

[AshleytheGreat]

Thats so neat how they can do that.

What if they did that to seagulls!? LMAO there dumb as rocks tho.

[fish_doc]

I do know they have trained dolphins to do many things to protect solders. For instance finding mines in narrow river channels. They spot them and bring a bouy near them and wait for the bomb squad. They were used in the gulf for just that purpose.

[Lara]

Well what do you know, I thought it must have been a joke! I think the soldiers should find their own mines! What a bizarre world we live in

[fishboy]

what we can do these days amazes me

[fish_doc]

Actually it makes perfect sense to have them do the job. Its no different than using dogs to find drugs or bombs during border searches of cars.

[Osiris]

This is for real i believe was on yahoo news hmmmm

[TheOldSalt]

Yes, it's for real.
I used to be in the dolphin training world, after all, and I picked up a few things here & there along the way. Naval dolphins are used for all sorts of things, but just as the article says, their primary job is that of sentry.

Dolphins don't sleep. They don't need to see in the dark. They are very intelligent, very powerful, and easily trained.

These qualities make them very suited to the job of hanging around sensitive areas and eliminating anyone who comes too close, such as a diver who doesn't know the signal to let the dolphin know he's a friendly.
I don't know about the whole drug-dart thing, but I don't discount it. However, sentry dolphins certainly don't need any tools other than their own tails to put a stop to any enemy shenannigans. A dolphin can easily snap a man in half with a single tail-flick, and with the right training, they're pretty good at it.

This isn't really classified information or anything, but as you might imagine, it's not something they like to talk about, either.