Out to Sea
By Susanna Space, Writer
Excerpted with permission from Guernica Magazine. Read the full article here.
Photo: Beluga whale. ©Javier Yaya Tur (CAC, S. A.)/Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias. Valencia. www.cac.es
One morning in the spring of 2019 a beluga whale swam up beside a red fishing boat off the far north coast of Norway. Eleven feet long and gleaming white, the animal drew close, tugging the ship’s ropes, rubbing against its hull, and opening his mouth as if expecting food.
Joar Hesten watched the whale from the boat’s deck. It was unusual to see a beluga so far south at that time of year. The animal’s behavior, too, was unusual; whales didn’t tend to pay much attention to fishing boats. A thick nylon strap encircled the whale’s head just behind his shiny black eyes. A second strap was cinched tightly under his flippers.
Hesten reported the animal, and the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries investigated. When the Directorate failed to free him, they enlisted Hesten’s help. A bearded, ruddy-cheeked 26-year-old, he jumped into the frigid water in a survival suit and unfastened the harness. Hesten was photographed afterward on the deck of the Directorate’s boat clutching the thick straps, a smile of modest victory on his lips.
The straps appeared to have been used to hold a Go-Pro-style camera, although there was some speculation they could have been used as a mount for a weapon. Norway’s domestic intelligence agency confirmed that the whale had most likely escaped from one of several holding pens inside a Russian military base 800 miles to the east, in Murmansk.
The story made international headlines. But while the public reacted with astonishment at the discovery of a Russian whale “spy,” the beluga was hardly the first wild animal to be drafted for military service. The Soviet and US navies, in particular, have long exploited marine mammals for military advantage. During the Cold War, both countries sponsored the capture and training of whales, dolphins and their marine mammal relatives in a race to discover how their streamlined bodies and complex biology — highly sophisticated systems refined by nature over millennia — could be put to work to spy on enemies and win wars.
Photo: Bottlenose dolphins in the Bahamas. ©Carl Safina
By the early 1960s, naval engineers in the US were examining dolphins especially closely. Their sleek shape inspired new hydrodynamic designs for submarines and torpedoes, but that work was quickly overshadowed as scientists delved into cetacean biosonar. In Navy laboratories, dolphins demonstrated an uncanny ability to “see” their underwater world. In milliseconds, they adjusted the direction and width of the signals they sent into the water, shifting the form and frequency of their sonar as humans use their vision to read and respond to a landscape. They identified tiny objects from great distances and easily located even targets buried under the sea floor. Scientists were delighted to see that the animals could be trained to make fine distinctions among objects, distinguishing between, for example, a bullet and a kernel of corn.
No laws were yet in place to protect marine mammals, and all of the work was classified, so whales and dolphins were captured freely on the open ocean and hauled back to the lab. The scientists carved out, dissected, and experimented with countless jawbones, inner ears and cortexes. The creatures’ powerful physiological systems worked so flawlessly. Surely, the men thought, the technology could be replicated.
After Hesten freed the beluga from his harness, Norway celebrated. The animal was christened Hvaldimir — a fusing of hval, the Norwegian word for whale, with Vladimir, for Vladimir Putin, in homage to the nation from which the animal had escaped. Around the world, the public was fascinated with this strange window into the Russian military machine, delighting in the Norwegians’ benevolence in the face of those who would weaponize a wild animal.
For a while the young whale seemed content in the confines of Tufjord harbor. He entertained locals and tourists alike, following boats as they traveled in and out of the waters. Then, less than a week after Hesten first spotted him, Hvaldimir swam out to sea, trailing a small sailboat on a five-hour cruise southwest to Hammerfest. For reasons no human understands, he decided to remain there, in the town’s harbor.
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After more than a decade studying cetaceans, in the early 1970s the US Navy sent five dolphins from its new, top-secret Marine Mammal Program to Vietnam. The dolphins were shipped across the Pacific Ocean and released into Cam Rahn Bay, where they guarded American ships from enemy divers. The highly trained animals patrolled the waters, surfacing to alert handlers when they detected someone or something unexpected beneath the surface.
Meanwhile, at home, Americans were growing increasingly concerned about a better-understood and far more visible marine mammal issue: bycatch. Dolphins, whales and other cetaceans were being ensnared by commercial fishing nets and killed by the thousands. In 1972, President Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The new law sought to protect marine mammals by forbidding anyone to harass, hunt, capture, or kill them in US waters.
The law anticipated exceptions for certain “takings,” though. These included provisions for a reduced number of incidental killings by commercial fishing companies, subsistence fishing by Native Alaskans, and captures and killings associated with certain kinds of scientific research. Also included in the exemptions were injuries or deaths of marine mammals deemed necessary for reasons of national security.
While the MMPA was a watershed in environmental legislation, members of a new activist-oriented animal rights movement found the new law woefully insufficient. A young Australian philosopher named Peter Singer was then drafting what would become a seminal text of the movement. In Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, he argued that animals should be recognized as equal to humans, and that their plight should receive the same attention as the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Among the new generation of animal rights champions was Ric O’Barry, a dolphin trainer-turned-activist who fought for the release of all captive dolphins and for an end to laws permitting humans to own dolphins.
Not long after the publication of Singer’s book, two 26-year-old researchers working at a University of Hawaii marine laboratory — one of whom spent two years living alongside research dolphins — began to complain to the lab’s senior researchers about the conditions there. When their complaints went unheeded, the two men hatched a plan. Early one morning in the spring of 1977, they removed two 350-pound female Atlantic bottlenose dolphins from their tanks, slipping them into the back of a van. They then drove some 50 miles to Yokahama Bay. There, as dawn was breaking, they released the animals into the surf.
The dolphins had been subjects of Navy-funded research into cetacean language and communication. Talking to the press after their arrest, the men explained that they objected to the dolphins’ living conditions. At the lab, the dolphins were housed alone in small tanks — analogous, the men said, to imprisoning a human in a 10-by-10-foot room with only an elephant for company.
On trial, the researchers asserted that it was unethical to deprive the dolphins — wild creatures wholly unable to communicate their wishes to their captors — of the freedom to choose where and how they lived. After much research and soul-searching, they said, they had determined the dolphins to be as human as they were. As such, they said, they were no man’s property….