This past weekend I was housesitting for my neighbors'. Griffy somehow managed to kill one of their chickens, making me look real good. This dog has become quite a killer in recent weeks -- but this weekend I learned about an animal that's as trainable as a dog and potentially more deadly as well. I am talking, of course, about the dolphin.

It started when I read this article in Smithsonian magazine. It's about a controversy over stranded dolphins in the Florida Keys, not terribly interesting, but one of the players in the controversy is a man who used to work for the Navy to train dolphins.

Yes, that's right, the Navy trains and researches dolphins. They admit as much on this website for the Navy Marine Mammal Program. The Navy claims, however, that it has never used or trained dolphins as offensive military weapons.

But, the guy in the Smithsonian article disputes that, and so I decided to do a bit more digging. I found this terrifyingly comprehensive website about dolphins. In addition to having every known fact about every known dolphin on the face of the earth, this website covers the military use of dolphins in exhaustive detail (scroll down the menu bar to find the military stuff). The problem is that the only people willing to talk about these projects (which are classified) are people who have quit, so there is some incentive for them to exaggerate or lie. Nonetheless, the allegations are troubling.

Some highlights:

Basically, the Navy got into the dolphin business in the 1950s when they saw that dolphins have great hydrodynamics and better sonar than the man-made variety. They decided to look at them as a way to inform human technology. It wasn't long, though, before they realized that dolphins can be trained to perform complex tasks and do successive deep dives much faster than human divers, who have to worry about the bends. This led to the development of dolphins as tracking animals for finding sunken things, submerged mines, and, eventually, submarines.

According to some people, they were trained for other tasks as well. They could be trained to deliver explosives or to kill enemy divers who might be mining a ship. There is some discussion about how exactly they killed divers; the most likely method seems to be pulling out their mouthpieces and then pushing them up to the surface, which would give them the bends. It is alleged that these killer dolphins were actually used to protect American ships in Vietnam, where it was assumed that anyone in the water at night was probably an enemy. (The CIA was supposedly a part of this. Leave it to them to train dolphins to kill, eh? Reminds me of the onion article where dolphins develop opposable thumbs.)

Where it gets really scary, though, is when the Russians come in. One Navy dolphin in the 1960s named "Tuffy" became somewhat famous for his ability to perform difficult tasks. The Russians saw this and began their own dolphin program in the Black Sea. That's right; to use Jon's phrase, there was a "dolphin arms race." One thing the Russians supposedly studied was what sort of background noise disrupted dolphin sonar. Americans took this to mean that they were studying dolphin countermeasures, and some smart people saw where this was heading. If you know dolphins are being used by the enemy, you should kill the dolphins! The logical strategy in a naval battle would be to poison the sea so that the other side can't use dolphins. This, the smart people realized, was a bad thing. So, I think the military use of dolphins has been scaled back a bit. It still goes on, though.

Sorry for such a long post; there's tons more information at that site if you're interested in this like I am.