Flame and smoke rise from the Crimean bridge connecting the Russian mainland and the Crimean Peninsula over the Kerch Strait. Photo / AP
Flame and smoke rise from the Crimean bridge connecting the Russian mainland and the Crimean Peninsula over the Kerch Strait. Photo / AP
OPINION:
Putin's bridge to the Crimea that was attacked the other day by Ukraine or its agents was defended at each end by soldiers, on all sides by technology and underwater by dolphins.
Killer dolphins apparently. And if you want evidence of bastardry you can't go past killerdolphins.
Dolphins live by killing, as most animals do. They kill fish and squid and other creatures of the sea. But, as a rule, they don't kill us.
Because of this, and because they are clearly intelligent, and because they seem to enjoy riding the bow wave of our boats, we indulge in cartoon fantasies about the sweet nature of dolphins.
We pay tourism operators to drop us in among them so we can swim with them. And just by dint of not being eaten when we do so we almost convince ourselves that there is some sort of gentle spiritual bond between us, with both of us being what we like to call "higher mammals".
But that doesn't stop us from penning dolphins into aquatic theme parks and teaching them to perform tricks for the amusement of overweight tourists in Florida.
Or from making movies about liberating them from those same aquatic theme parks for the same overweight tourists to feel sentimental over.
Dolphins are our moral superiors, says Joe Bennett.
In short, the way we treat dolphins says rather more about us than it does about them, and not all of it is pleasant. And now the Russians have used them for military purposes.
Nothing to surprise us there. As a species, we have been using animals for military purposes for a very long time.
Two hundred years before Jesus came to tell us we were all made in God's image, Hannibal marched 37 battle elephants out of Africa into Spain and eventually over the Alps into Italy. All but one of them died from hunger and exhaustion before ever going into battle, but the intention was there (though if they had gone into battle they could have been readily seen off. Elephants are terrified of bees. The Romans had only to send in a battalion of apiarists and the elephants would have turned and run. And if they'd trampled Hannibal into a pulp as they did so it would have been hard to argue it was an injustice).
The most commonly weaponised animal is the horse. Six-hundred years after Hannibal, Attila, King of the Huns, swept out of the east on horseback and conquered the world.
His archers were famous but it was the horse that carried them that was the greater weapon, the peaceable vegetarian horse that has been known to have the odd squabble during the mating season but otherwise asks only to live a life of undisturbed grazing.
For the next 1500 years, human land wars were dominated by cavalry. The knights and the cuirassiers and the lancers were celebrated and admired but the horses that enabled them and that died in their hundreds of thousands were not. They were as expendable as any other ammunition.
World War I was both the last and the worst for horses. Roughly six million were drafted against their will. Few went home again. Many died horribly.
After that, we largely stopped using horses to fight our wars but not because of some sort of moral revelation. It was just that we'd invented the internal combustion engine.
And now Russia's using dolphins. Though again that's not new. In the 1990s the US Navy did experiments with a dozen species of marine mammals, as well as sharks, rays, turtles and marine birds, in a bid to find some that might be of military use. It settled on dolphins and sea lions and trained them to locate mines and to detect and deter "unauthorised swimmers".
But they did not train dolphins to kill those swimmers because they could find no way of teaching a dolphin to distinguish between friend and foe - which of course makes dolphins our moral superiors, but that's a point for another day.
The Russians, it seems, have not similarly held back. In their military aquatic centre in Sebastopol, they have trained dolphins for combat roles.
These dolphins have learned to attach mines to enemy ships and to kill enemy divers. To do this they are apparently fitted with a device that somehow injects the victim with CO2.
It is fortunate for the animal kingdom that no species other than ours considers itself humane.
