The U.S. Navy has been using dolphins and sea lions for decades as equipment retrievers and underwater sentries. Now, they are taking it a step farther in training sea lions to sweep for mines and trap enemy divers. It is all part of the U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal Program, which is based out of San Diego. However, these animals have been deployed into combat zones as far away as Vietnam and Iran. Sea lions are currently being trained to capture and detain divers that could be enemy combatants. They do so by attaching a special clamp to the divers legs, which is attached to a line. Once captured, people at the surface can reel in the diver. Additinonally, their training in underwater retrieval has made them perfectly suited for sweeping the ocean for underwater mines. As of now, there are 28 sea lions in the program, but soon a new team of sea lions will defend the Kitsap-Bangor base in Washington state.
A sea lion of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program attaching a recovery line to a piece of test equipment.
Additionally, a new sea lion unit is being trained in San Francisco. It takes about 4 years to train these sea lions and the program spends 20 million dollars a year.
There has been ongoing controversy over the NMMP's treatment of these animals, and the debate will rage on over the ethics of using animals in the military. In any event, such capabilities of these sea lions shows just how far their cognition goes. They are intelligent animals, able to be conditioned into very complex behaviors. Whether it is ethical or not, these sea lions as well as many other marine mammals have proved useful to our Navy.
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