Dolphin Death Squad Menaces Gulf of Mexico

Dolphin assassins menace Gulf of Mexico


from
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09...sins_run_amok/

from
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/inter...577753,00.html



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.

"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. ®