Five Navy dolphins trained for military operations will be honorably discharged from the service next month, thanks to Pentagon budget cuts and the Cold War's end.
If all goes as planned, their last military maneuver will be a C-141 flight from San Diego to a privately owned dolphin sanctuary near Key West, Fla.In an agreement reached between the Navy and Humane Society of the United States this week, the bottle-nosed dolphins will be flown to the marine mammal sanctuary at Sugarloaf for rehabilitation and eventual release into the wild, said Rachel Pancik, a spokeswoman for the Humane Society.
The agreement and subsequent release are subject to approval by the Agriculture Department and the National Marine Fisheries Service, both of which enforce laws applying to marine mammals.
Navy dolphins have been used for various tasks, including surveillance and mine detection.
The Navy has 79 dolphins, but only about 25 of them are "gainfully employed" in active units, said Lt. Cmdr. Ed Barker, a spokesman for the Naval Warfare Systems Command. Two dozen trained sea lions and beluga whales also are in the Navy programs, he said.
The dolphins once trained with Navy divers to retrieve torpedoes and other explosives, locate mines and detect "enemy swimmers."
The five dolphins being considered for transfer are young males who were recently captured from the Gulf of Mexico. Dolphin expert Rick O'Barry, a longtime critic of the Navy who is working on the dolphin transfer, said the dolphins are ideal candidates for release.
"We have high hopes that we can rehabilitate these animals and return them to the wild," O'Barry said in a statement.
Dr. Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist with the Humane Society, said the dolphins must lose their dependency on humans for food, shelter and attention, and must be resensitized to natural dangers they did not face in captivity, ranging from storms to sharks.
The reprogramming "can be done as quickly as a month or . . . up to six months," Rose said.
She said the Sugarloaf facility can accommodate up to 12 dolphins, and the goal is to obtain new dolphins as those retrained are released. Observers may also recommend against releasing a dolphin if it appears that the animal cannot be retrained, she said.
The Navy earlier offered to give 25 of its dolphins to marine parks and aquariums, but so far only four parks have made formal requests for the mammals.