They may not be sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads, but they might be just as bad when roaming freely around the oceans. The U.S. Navy’s cetacean training program should come as no surprise to any naval warfare enthusiast. The Navy has been training sea animals to detect mines for decades.
What might surprise people is that some of those animals escaped in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and could be roaming the oceans as you read this.
“… and thanks for all the fish.”
(U.S. Navy photo by Brian Aho)
The Navy trains animals like the California Sea Lion and Bottlenose dolphins to retrieve lost equipment and patrol certain seaways for individual swimmers who might be infiltrating military bases via the water. Dolphins are particularly useful due to their high intelligence and built-in sonar that allows them to detect people and objects they might not ever see. In the Global War on Terror, the Navy reportedly began training dolphins to shoot potential terrorists targeting Navy ships.
But a special investigator claimed that after Hurricane Katrina, a few of these deadly dolphin guards escaped, and the Navy has been looking for them ever since. He cites reports that the Navy had repeatedly assisted other groups in finding groups of dolphins, many wearing special harnesses, but refusing to release the dolphins to their owners before secretly examining them.
That investigator, Leo Sheridan, says the Navy’s examinations were an attempt to find out if those dolphins belonged to an oceanarium or to the U.S. Navy.
“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,” Sheridan told The Guardian. “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?”
The alleged dolphin assassins were supposedly being held in training ponds near Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain and were controlled through radio signals transmitted to the animal via a special harness. The Navy has never admitted any of its dolphins escaped in the wake of Katrina or anywhere else.