Beware the Army of Dolphins… by draft
they may have reason to be angry with us:
The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.
Criticism from animal rights groups ensured the use of dolphins became more secretive. But the project gained impetus after the Yemen terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Dolphins have also been used to detect mines near an Iraqi port.
And now they have been washed out to sea, let loose by Katrina. I can just picture them diving deep to escape the churning hurricane waters. Bleeping to eachother with their own wise language and their embedded electrodes, they recon out by some sunken spanish galley and debate their new predicament.
Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness.
Armed and trained, they know their meant for higher things, and without the ever-present teams of men with their whistles and electricity they’re not sure what to do or who they are supposed to shoot. Maybe they disagree and there’s a tustle for authority, or maybe they take one look at each other and the wide sea and go off on one of their leaping, flipping goofy dolphin bender/sprees. But once they’ve finished celebrating their freedom, they are bound to feel some sense of armed-and-ready responsibility:
‘My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,’
There’s a lot of theory out there about communicating with dolphins, and wonder about what they might want to say to eachother. Now that we’ve armed them with the ability to make decidedly clear and violent statements, we may find out what they think of us and the state of their old oceans.
Source: Armed and Dangerous
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