Only the Animals (23 page)

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Authors: Ceridwen Dovey

BOOK: Only the Animals
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Whatever purpose the US Navy could imagine for us dolphins, they were convinced the Soviets were ten steps ahead of them. They trained my mother's team firmly, as subordinates. They were not interested in building a relationship with them as individuals, but in what they could get out of them as a group in a utilitarian sense. My mother claimed it was better that way, the trainer–trainee relationship less fraught with emotion and need.

But Officer Bloomington was different. When he started working with me in the late 1970s, he was only twenty-one, skinny, newly graduated from college with a marine sciences degree made possible by his Navy scholarship, and ridiculously proud of his tattoo of a seahorse on the sole of his foot (anywhere else and the enlisters would have given him grief for it). One of his professors at college had briefly worked in the Caribbean laboratory established by John C. Lilly in the '60s to carry out all sorts of bizarre, unconventional research on dolphin–human communication, and he got Officer Bloomington onto Lilly's work. It was far too unorthodox for Officer Bloomington – he knew he would never dare do the kinds of things that Lilly had – but it encouraged him to think of dolphins differently. One of Lilly's experiments, for example, required the researcher to take LSD then climb into an isolation tank with dolphins beneath it in a sea pool, to communicate with them on alternate sound waves. Another involved the researcher living in isolation with a dolphin for months in a laboratory flooded with sixteen inches of seawater.

I think Officer Bloomington suspected Lilly was a bit of a creep – so many of the photographs in Lilly's books featured his female research assistants, who all happened to be gorgeous women with long red nails, happy to give horny dolphins belly scratches or hand jobs. But in the interests of my education he read to me from these books, and from anything else about dolphins he could find, scientific or imagined. He would get secretly stoned and read to me about Johnny Mnemonic, a foul-mouthed cyborg dolphin who's a US Navy veteran and a heroin addict. He organised a screening for the trainee dolphins of the Mike Nichols film
The Day of the Dolphin
, projecting it onto the wall opposite our pens. We found the movie quite funny, though we knew it was intended to be serious, because the dolphins playing the characters Alpha and Beta (who were being trained by some bad guys to blow up the President's yacht) kept saying rude things that only dolphins could understand about the lead human actor in the underwater scenes.

When
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
was published, Officer Bloomington read it to me so many times I can still remember most of Chapter 23 by heart
(it's a short chapter):

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner,' but in fact the message was this:
So long and thanks for all the fish.

That used to crack Officer Bloomington up every time he read it, though it might have had more to do with the quality of his weed. Sometimes, on nights when I couldn't get half of my brain to fall asleep, I would amuse myself thinking up alternate lines for the dolphins' final message to humans, with the restriction that I could only use titles of songs I'd heard being played on the radio at our facility. The line would depend on my mood, and what I'd been asked to do that day. Some days it would be ‘Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?' On days when I was feeling sentimental: ‘Call Me' or ‘We Don't Talk Anymore' or ‘Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood'. On bad mood days: ‘Tired of Toein' the Line'.

*   *   *

Each morning, Officer Bloomington took me from my home pen at Point Loma out into the training area, laid on a rubber mat in the boat. The first skill he taught me to master was how to wiggle myself overboard once he'd pointed my tail in the right direction; the second was how to get myself back onto the boat unassisted at the end of the session. I quickly learned to retrieve a Frisbee, balancing it on my nose like a regular showoff. Over time, our training sessions became more challenging, geared towards teaching me to identify and locate features on the sea floor that might be useful or dangerous to the Navy, such as dropped equipment or mines buried in sediment.

Officer Bloomington understood from the beginning that I knew exactly what was going on. More than anything, he wanted to earn the moral right to give me commands by demonstrating that he considered me to have a form of consciousness as complex as his own. As our relationship developed, he relied less and less on food-reward training, disliking it because it assumed that my needs were base, and also because of the cruel anti-foraging muzzles that had been standard issue in my mother's day.

It was a partnership, one that I was born into, but still. He liked to say we had a true I/thou relationship, quoting some philosopher or other – that we related as subject to subject, not subject to object, and communicated with our whole beings. In another life, I think he would have used his skills differently, as a scientific researcher who observed and recorded, rather than as a handler who had to elicit certain behaviours from us to keep his job. He figured out long before his contemporaries that we use a combination of high- and low-frequency sounds – clicks, buzzes, creaks, whistles – to convey information and emotion, and he learned to identify the signature whistle of each dolphin under his command, which is our own form of naming.

By the time I was fully trained, the Navy had five marine mammal teams, each with specialist skills. My mother wanted me to join MK6, but I was placed instead in MK7, a dolphin-only team who specialised in finding and tagging mines embedded in the ocean floor.
The other two dolphin-only teams, MK4 and MK8, worked on locating floating
mines in the water column and mapping out safe underwater passages for troop landings onshore. MK5 comprised sea lions (who have no sonar ability but better underwater directional hearing and low-light vision than we do) briefed with naval equipment recovery. There were a few beluga whales in that team, recruited because they also use sonar but can withstand colder water and dive deeper than we can. We didn't see much of the sea lions or whales except on joint training exercises, when we were all operating under strict rules of engagement. I think this suited those in charge of the program. They preferred us to focus our need for communication on the humans training us, and perhaps didn't like to think of us coming up with secret plans and clever tricks together. It reeked of mutiny.

*   *   *

My first tour of duty was in the Persian Gulf in 1987, during the Iran–Iraq war. My MK7 team was deployed to search the ocean floor for embedded mines for a set radius around the 3rd Fleet Flagship USS
La Salle
in the harbour in Bahrain. MK6 was also deployed, to escort oil tankers from Kuwait through safe waters. It was thrilling to finally be part of a real mission after so many years of training, and I remember feeling closer to Officer Bloomington than ever before. I would use echolocation to scan for mine-like objects and report back to him if I found one, knocking a black buoy beside the boat to confirm a sighting. He would then send me to deposit the anchor of a buoy close to the object to alert other Navy vessels, until the object could be checked and deactivated by a specialist team of divers.

We lost two dolphin team members on that mission, not due to sea mines accidentally detonating (this happens rarely, as we are trained not to disturb them and they are programmed to detonate only when a large metal object passes overhead). The dolphins were machine-gunned to death near the surface by Iranian boat-patrol units who had figured out what we were doing. Some native wild dolphins were also killed this way, though we'd tried to keep them away from the area by acting territorially. Officer Bloomington took this especially hard. He hadn't anticipated it as a consequence and blamed himself for their deaths. He felt that the skilled Navy dolphins at least had a chance of defending themselves, but the native dolphins had been put directly in harm's way. He tried to record their deaths officially so that this could be prevented on future missions, but his superiors blocked him, worried about a public outcry.

*   *   *

Back at the San Diego training facility at the end of this mission, I was given a few years to recover from active service, after which I was allowed to breed. I like to think I didn't make the same mistake as my mother, who had encouraged me to believe I had a better life in the Navy than I ever could out in the wild. I apologised to my daughter so often for bringing her into a world of captivity that she found it ridiculous. As it turned out, she was given a choice. When she was born in 1993, our program was being downsized (or ‘right-sized', as the expensive consultants liked to call it) in the aftermath of the Cold War, and many of our team members were being retired or released. The Navy put some of the oldest dolphins up for sale to leisure facilities and parks around the US, but nobody was buying – by then, most aquariums or dolphinariums were doing their own breeding in-house.

One morning in the autumn after my daughter was born, Officer Bloomington took all the dolphins under his authority, including me, my mother and my baby girl, out into the bay and released us without giving a specific task or return command. He explained what was happening, speaking respectfully as he always did, trusting us to understand. He anticipated a long, drawn-out retirement process where federal permits would be needed before any of us could be released into the wild, and he wanted to spare us the fate of being trapped where we were no longer needed, or sold off to some depressing sea life park.

My mother decided to try out life in the deep blue sea again. She was forty-seven by then, the only surviving Vietnam War vet from her team. She and I both knew she didn't have much time left, and I understood that she was really choosing a free death, whereas the other six who decided to join her were choosing a free life. They are the only seven dolphins ever recorded as not having returned to their handler in the history of our program. Officer Bloomington stated the cause as unusual disobedience in his logbook and almost lost his job over it, but he'd stalled for long enough to give the escapees a good chance of not being recaptured.

My daughter knew that morning out in the bay that she was free to go. She watched forlornly as her grandmother swam away, sending reassuring clicks and whistles back to her so that she'd know she was not in distress. But like me, my daughter chose to stay, and when the time came she was assigned to MK7. This made me happy, as I knew Officer Bloomington would look after her as he had me. He'd been there from her first moments in the world, supporting me as I birthed her. He'd camped beside my pen for nights as my due date approached so that he would not miss my labour. In the minutes after she was born, in the middle of the night, I nudged her to the surface and held her there while she learned to breathe, and Officer Bloomington literally jumped up and down beside the pool, yelling and whooping.

He named her Officer, so that she might always have a fitting military title as a first name. He understood the significance of her birth for all of us: the third generation of a female military family. Females have served in the US military for much longer than anybody realises, he liked to remind his colleagues in the '80s, when the gender issue was heating up and most of the men were intransigent. Back then, the Navy Marine Mammal Program was still in full swing, with over a hundred dolphins, many of us female, and a massive operating budget. But the men laughed at him. They didn't like to think of us as male or female; we were just animals.

*   *   *

Soon after my mother had decided to die free, a new
dolphin arrived at our base in San Diego. His name was Kostya. He was Russian, part of the Dolphin Division trained at the Soviet Navy's secret base on the Black Sea. They too had run into funding difficulties in the years after the Cold War thawed. Kostya and most of his team were up for sale, and the Soviets were prepared to sell to anyone who could afford the exorbitant price, even if the buyer was the very enemy against whom these dolphins had been trained to work.

Kostya arrived with his female Soviet trainer, Chief Petty Officer Mishin,
to be the lead dolphin/handler pair in a new, highly classified training program within our facility. Officer Mishin had skin so pale it seemed to glow, especially when she was beside Officer Bloomington, whose years working under the San Diego sun
had turned him a nutshell brown. He surprised me by becoming tongue-tied around her – for so long, he had been a confirmed bachelor, committed to us and nobody else. Sometimes, after a training session, I saw him gazing at the puddles she'd left on the jetty as she wrung seawater out of her hair, as if they might give him a clue to understanding her.

He had been instructed to work closely with her and Kostya to learn their training techniques, but he soon realised that Officer Mishin's approach was as gentle as his own. She teased him about this, told him he was gullible to have believed all the rumours of draconian Iron Curtain methods, and in response he would smile a smile I had never seen on him before, shy and delighted and fearful all at the same time, the smile of a man hopelessly in love and unsure if the feeling could ever be mutual. My daughter and I observed all this with a mix of pity and amusement, secure in the fact that the feeling was not mutual, for we could tell from our scanning that Officer Mishin was left unmoved by Officer Bloomington's attentions. We did not want to share him.

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