Killer Dolphins? -- Former Trainer Says Navy Plans To Equip Them With Nose Guns

KEY WEST, Fla. - The Navy is training bottlenose dolphins to kill enemy frogmen with a .45-caliber nose gun, according to a former trainer and an animal-rights activist.

A Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition he would not be named, denied such a gun exists or that there are plans to develop one.

The device is at the center of the Navy's multimillion-dollar scheme to use dolphins as sentries for the Trident nuclear-submarine base at Bangor, Wash., said Rick Trout, who worked under contract with the Navy as a civilian from 1985 to 1988.

In classified training programs in Key West, San Diego and Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, assault dolphins are being taught to carry the devices on their snouts - without bullets - and hit targets, Trout said.

Sea lions also have been trained to use a firing device, Trout said. Instead of a nose cone, a sea lion is given a cupped bite-plate attached to a canister that would hold bullets.

Lt. James Wood, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, declined to comment on the nose-gun allegation. ``Details about the Navy's marine mammal program are classified,'' Wood said.

``However, the training and operations in which the marine mammals are involved does not put them at risk of harm or injury,'' he said.

Trout and animal-rights activist Richard O'Barry, head of Dolphin Project in Coconut Grove, raised three major concerns about the nose gun: it could harm the dolphins; it could harm innocent divers; and dolphins, playful and nonaggressive animals by nature, aren't effective as assault weapons.

On several occasions in 1987 and 1988, the unarmed nose cone fell off the dolphin's snout and was recovered floating in waters near the training facilities, according to Trout and David Reams, a dolphin trainer at the Los Angeles Zoo who worked for the Navy in San Diego as a civilian trainer from early 1986 to September 1987.

Trout said the program started at least five years ago; O'Barry, who shot a videotape last year that shows a dolphin swimming with a nose cone, said a Navy source told him the program is ongoing but is three years behind schedule.

Trout worked for the Navy as a sea-lion trainer and dolphin trainer at San Diego's Point Loma submarine base.

Trout cited one case where a dolphin he was training with the nose-cone device for a 1987 test deployment in the Persian Gulf repeatedly failed to hit the target diver. Tom Lapuzza, spokesman for the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, confirmed yesterday that six dolphins were sent from San Diego that year to the Persian Gulf.

``It just laid its chin on the guy's shoulder,'' Trout said.

The nose-gun device, according to Trout, consists of a fiberglass nose cone molded from a resin cast of each dolphin's snout. The cone, which has a soft-plastic lining to enhance suction around the snout, is attached to a hard-plastic foam fluorescent-orange canister.

Inside the canister is a spring-loaded firing mechanism. The firing pin is designed to trigger when the dolphin rams the hard, protruding end of the canister into an intruder, Trout said.

A .45-caliber bullet would then be shot from the canister, he said.

In late 1988, Trout accused the Navy of allowing poorly trained handlers to kick or hit the dolphins and sea lions in its marine mammal program.

The federal Marine Mammal Commission, in a February 1989 follow-up report, confirmed isolated instances of abuse, but said that mishandling was not a widespread problem.

Trout said he decided to reveal the contents of the classified program because of a pending federal lawsuit between the Navy and 15 animal-rights groups that could lead to deployment of 16 bottlenose dolphins in the frigid waters of Puget Sound.

The dolphins in the Navy program have been captured in the 78-degree waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Their mission is to patrol in water averaging 54 degrees.

In federal court in Seattle, a suit has successfully delayed the Navy from deploying the dolphins at the Bangor base until it provides a thorough environmental-impact assessment of the animals' adaptability to cold waters and to 24-foot holding pens.

Mitchell Fox, Seattle-based director of the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, chief plaintiff in the suit against the Navy, said he expected an out-of-court settlement within a few weeks.

Fox said the petitioning organizations wanted to prevent a repeat death of a Navy dolphin. Nalu, the first and only dolphin to reportedly have been assigned a trial run in the waters of Hood Canal, died of heart failure 11 days after being transported from the Navy's training base in Hawaii. Nalu's October 1988 death triggered the suit.