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Death by dolphin

 
 
subcultureofone
19:36 / 26.09.05
i'm surprised they didn't try to send the dolphins into the flooded parts of new orleans to 'round up the looters' or somesuch. instead of just looking for mines, these dolphins are licensed to kill, or at least make you very sleepy while in the water.

dolphins- armed and dangerous

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
 
 
grant
20:12 / 26.09.05
There are a couple of angles discussion could take on this.

For one thing, military dolphins -- although they've turned up before on Barbelith's discussions of animal intelligence, the strange turns of the Iraq War and as iconic figures in comic books like The Filth -- haven't really been examined as test cases of the way we relate to intelligence and other creatures. Since we've done the same thing with sea lions.....

But there's also a kind of deja vu over this story for anyone familiar with Louisiana ecology.

Test animals kept offshore are hit by a hurricane and escape to the wide world to wreak havoc -- surely you're talking about nutria!

If you're unfamiliar, these creatures are basically three-foot-long rats with orange teeth. The McIlhenny family -- the folks who invented Tabasco sauce -- started rearing them for fur on Avery Island. Then a hurricane came along, they got onto the mainland, and they've been destroying the bayous ever since by grazing the native plants down to the roots.

Ecologists have been stymied, and plans to turn them into a new star of Cajun cuisine seem to have flopped.


Somehow, I can't really see breeding colonies of dart gun-toting attack dolphins becoming a hazard around the mouth of the Mississippi, but maybe that's just because our technology hasn't advanced enough yet. Give it another five years and another natural disaster....
 
 
Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown
21:20 / 26.09.05
Now, the article wasn't clear. Were these dolphins equipped with their anti-human harnesses when they "escaped"? That seems a bit sloppy, even for the US Military.
 
 
Lysander Stark
09:53 / 27.09.05
The US taking inspiration from Star Trek for technological leaps was one thing, but taking them from Seaquest DSV-- surely these are the death throes of military invention?...

Mind you, for bathers it could become a bit more of a dangerous We 3situation, à la Grant Morrison.
 
 
Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown
19:25 / 27.09.05
I thought it was more of a Johnny Mneumonic (movie, not the story) sort of take on things. "Do YOU know what you're doing? Does the FISH?"

What was the movie where they were some sort of monster escaped and the line about the military facility it escaped from was "...they're the people who teach chimps to be suicide bombers and dolphins to plant limpet mines on submarines"?
 
 
Lord Morgue
12:36 / 28.09.05
Dolphins don't exactly need guns to kill. Those magnificent bastards regularly kill sharks by running into them with their beaks, with enough force to knock them out of the fucking water- I'm more worried about soon hearing of a spate of mysterious deaths where surfers are found looking like they've been worked over with a wrecking bar because Flipper got his dial stuck on four-and-a-half...
 
 
Quantum
12:38 / 28.09.05
breeding colonies of dart gun-toting attack dolphins becoming a hazard around the mouth of the Mississippi

But it would make an excellent premise for a sci-fi postapocalypse short story... excuse me...
*rushes to get pen and paper*
 
 
Lysander Stark
13:18 / 28.09.05
I was recently exposed to the evidence of the viciousness of our bottle-nose friends when on holiday in Wales-- a group of friends and I found ourselves chatting to the Strandings expert, who was securing the corpse of a porpoise that he had found; from the broken ribs, it was apparently clear that it had been pummelled in a technique that dolphins off the British coast have perfected.

The madness continues in that, off the Moray Firth in Scotland, the dolphins are using the same technique to kill their own young, leading some to the conclusion that the porpoises were a dry run.

Why would this happen only in Britain? Does this mean that they are dangerous regardless of the dart guns or lasers or limpet mines? Flipper, it would seem, has flipped...
 
 
angus
12:05 / 29.09.05
In a morally symmetric world, the dolphins would go after the nutria...
 
 
grant
12:56 / 29.09.05
...and arm *them*, too.
 
 
Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown
20:11 / 29.09.05
Actually, it occurs to me that if dolphins already have massive agressive tendencies then it would only be natural to equip them for military service.

Still, this suggests that dolphins are more like humans than I thought. They're pleasent and playful, but also relativly violent when it comes to it.

Heh. The porpoises were only practice...
 
 
astrojax69
21:30 / 29.09.05
dolphins? they have their porpoises.

it's ok, i'm going...
 
  
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