In April 2019, an "unusual" beluga whale was spotted in the waters off the island of Ingoya in northern Norway. It wore a rigging tool on its head that could hold the motion camera in place, with the words "St. Petersburg Equipment" printed on it, which aroused the interest of the Norwegian military.
And Murmansk, 415 kilometers away, is home to the base of Russia's Northern Fleet. It is said that the Russian Navy tried to capture and domesticate the beluga whale, so it is inevitable to speculate whether it is a "spy" who escaped, which was immediately denied by the Russian side.
Beluga whales found in Norway, and the st. Petersburg equipment on the rigging
Morten Vikeby, former Norwegian consul in Murmansk, said the beluga whale could be a "treatment whale" at an agency in northern Russia to assist in the treatment of children with mental illness.
"Beluga spy" may sound alarmist, but taming marine mammals such as dolphins and sea lions for military use is no longer a secret. Since the 1960s, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Navy have been conducting such exploratory research. During the Cold War, marine mammals were also part of the U.S.-Soviet arms race. From the perspective of actual combat, these "animal agents" who do not communicate with human language have made a lot of contributions.
During the Gulf War at the end of the last century, Iraq planted thousands of mines in the Gulf to prevent the U.S. naval fleet from entering the heart of the Persian Gulf. However, the U.S. military successfully entered the Persian Gulf, and the most incredible thing is that none of the warships were seriously damaged or sunk by the mines.
The "secret weapon" of the US military is a group of specially trained "dolphin soldiers." These dolphins use ultrasound to accurately detect the location of mines at long distances underwater. Once they spotted a target, they jumped out of the water and alerted the crew by shouting or banging an alarm bell tied to the side of the ship.
In addition, the "Dolphin Soldier" will also hook the mine with the hook and claw contained in the mouth, and then hand it over to the minesweeper. With such tacit cooperation, the US military was able to clear the underwater minefields deployed by Iraq in the Gulf.
Using dolphins for minesweeping can be said to be tried and tested. In the 2003 Anglo-American war against Iraq, the U.S. military airlifted a group of "Dolphin Soldiers" to Umm Qasr, a city in southern Iraq, to clear nearly 100 mines in the harbor channel. As a result, when the British and American coalition sent another minesweeper to search for mines under the riverbed, they did not find a single mine, which shows the strength of the "Dolphin Soldier".
Dolphins trained by the U.S. military during the 2003 Iraq War have a tracking device on their fins.
Dolphins benefit from a "sonar" with superior ultrasonic navigation and ranging capabilities in their bodies. Dolphins emit ultrasonic waves to their surroundings and are able to receive echoes, creating an acoustic image of the environment. Moreover, in shallow water environments such as ports and bays, there are many human and biological noises, and dolphins are not as easily disturbed as machines.
Not only that, but dolphins are also able to distinguish between different materials. Researchers conducted an experiment on a bottlenose dolphin named BJ in the 1990s. He asked BJ to distinguish between metal cylinders made of stainless steel, brass or aluminum, and even though these four-inch-long cylinders were buried in two feet of mud, BJ passed with distinction.
This intelligent marine mammal, known as the "second primate", also has many advantages in underwater combat, such as a very developed auditory system, which can distinguish various sounds on a wide sonic spectrum, and also has good vision in low-light environments. The original attraction of U.S. military scientists was dolphins' skilful swimming skills, which they wanted to learn how to design new streamlined torpedoes to attack Soviet submarines at the height of the Cold War.
Later, the U.S. military discovered the military potential of dolphins and abandoned biomimicry research. This became part of the U.S. Military's Marine Mammal Project (NMMP), which focuses on bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to study the military uses of marine mammals, based in San Diego, California.
Dolphin soldiers who are "clearing mines"
Paul Nachtigall, head of the Marine Mammal Research Program at the University of Hawaii, has said that bottlenose dolphins are better than any machine when it comes to detecting mines, and they can do it much faster than machines.
Such excellent dolphin soldiers also have certain limitations, so sea lion soldiers adapted to shallow waters and land have emerged. In the 2003 U.S.-British war against Iraq, some sea lions were already deployed around coalition ships stationed in Bahrain to protect forces. Once these sea lions spot suspicious figures in the sea, they will install a restriction device on them to indicate their location. If the intruders climb ashore, trained sea lions can chase them as fast as humans.
Sea lions in the Iraq War
After learning of the American study, the former Soviet Union also immediately activated the response, and the dolphins of the fighting nation also had superb abilities. They can load bombs on local ships and know how to detect torpedoes and shipwrecks. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the fighting dolphins were sold to Iran.
The woman in the poster, the first soviet-era diving commando, surrounded by a fighting dolphin, reads: "Join us." ”
And now Russia plans to re-breed fighting dolphins. In March 2014, Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, where dolphin training facilities have been in place since 1965. Ukraine asked to bring back the dolphins, but Russia refused. Unexpectedly, after four years most of the dolphins died. Boris Babin, Ukraine's representative in Crimea, said in 2018 that dolphins died as patriots, claiming they refused to obey Russian orders and therefore died of hunger strikes.
The militarized training of marine mammals sparked protests from animal protection groups in the 1980s, but the idea of the plan was perhaps even more brutal at the outset. Initially, the CIA planned to train a "dolphin death squad" that would embed the bomb in the front of the dolphin's belly and stomach, or hang a cylindrical mine on the dolphin's back, thus forming a "live torpedo" that would explode as the dolphin approached the vessel.
Although the idea seemed perfect, it encountered many obstacles in practice, so it did not apply. During World War II, a group of death squads composed of dogs really went to the battlefield.
In 1924, the Revolutionary Military Committee of the USSR approved the use of dogs for military operations, including rescue, communications, mine detection, etc. Soon 12 related training schools were established, the most special of which were three for the training of anti-tank dogs.
Soviet Military Dog Training School
In the early days of training, the Soviets placed food under a stationary tank, and then let hungry dogs go under the tank to find food, which over time made it reflex. After a while, tanks would start with food, and the Soviets would simulate the wartime environment with empty packs.
Before the war, these dogs will be hungry for a long time. In wartime, the Soviets would bundle each dog with a 10-12 kg mine. These mines have a 20 cm long wooden wrench on top of them, and when the dog tries to drill under the tank, the hand will be pulled to detonate the mine.
Anti-tank dog
After the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in 1941, the first anti-tank dogs arrived at the front. These anti-tank dogs undoubtedly play a role. A Soviet report of March 14, 1942 stated: "The enemy is afraid of anti-tank dogs and sends special troops to deal with them. At one point, the Germans ordered the shooting of all dogs in the field of vision, even using flamethrowers.
During the Battle of Stalingrad, anti-tank dogs reportedly blew up 12 German tanks parked nearby. During the Battle of Kursk in 1943, the anti-tank dogs also destroyed 15 German tanks.
However, dogs are not always very reliable, and anti-tank dogs have also made a lot of oolongs. In a battle in 1942, frantic dogs poured into the Soviet column, forcing an entire Division of the Soviet Army to retreat.
The dog that rushed to the tank
Later, with the introduction of more advanced anti-tank weapons, anti-tank dogs also disappeared from the battlefield, and the military dog training school was changed to train mine detection dogs and communication dogs.
Of course, there are also attempts to transform cats into spies. In the 1960s, the CIA launched a secret program code-named Operation Acoustic Kitty, which planned to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies.
First of all, the selected cat needs to be "armed". They installed a small radio transmitter at the bottom of the cat's skull, implanted an antenna in the fur, and then placed a microphone in the cat's ears. With such a "modification", the cat can smoothly record and transmit the heard sounds.
Transformed spy cat
CIA agents hope they can train the cat to sit near foreign officials. In this way, the cat can secretly teleport their private conversation back. In a field test, however, CIA staff took the kitten to the park and had it capture the conversation between two men sitting on a bench. Didn't expect the cat to wander the streets and was quickly squashed by a taxi.
So this secret plan had to be stopped. The CIA has used a lot of human, material and financial resources to prove that the cold meow masters are not suitable for spying, because they will not obey the command of humans in many cases.
Therefore, an important point for humans in the cultivation of animal agents is how to make animals completely obey the command of humans and complete the task well. Dogs can be said to have great advantages in this regard, so they are also widely used, such as blindness, drug enforcement, search and rescue.
When we think of animal behavior, we think of Pavlov and his dog. If the dog is fed every time the bell is rung, then after a while, as long as the dog hears the bell, it will secrete saliva even if there is no food, which is the classic conditioned reflex.
The new behaviorism that emerged in the 1930s combined with classical conditioning introduced the concept of operational conditioning. Unlike classical conditioning, which requires external stimuli to occur, operational conditioning is more based on environmental cues that allow animals (including humans) to do things voluntarily. The most famous experiment was Skinner's box by skinner, a psychologist at Harvard University at the time.
He designed a box with a lever or button in it. Then put a white mouse or pigeon in the box, and when it presses the lever or pecks the button, a ball of food will fall into the plate under the box, and the animal will be able to eat the food.
Schematic diagram of skinner box
Skinner found that even without external stimuli, these experimental animals would press levers or peck buttons; and after canceling food, experimental animals would maintain dozens or even hundreds of times of lever or pecking behavior. This shows that animal behavior can be shaped through reward and punishment mechanisms, and operant conditioning has become the core of Skinner's new behaviorist learning theory.
Based on this behaviorist theory, Bob Bailey, the first head of the American Dolphin Training Program, believes that any creature can be tamed, and it is not difficult. But this is clearly a limitation, and he ignores the nature and differences of animals. Therefore, not all animals are suitable as pets, and pets that get along with us day and night may also have the possibility of sudden "rebellion".
It is said that two dolphin soldiers in the US military once dragged heavy mines to their minesweepers, and the officers and men fired at the two dolphins in time before they were forced to throw mines and leave. According to U.S. military law regulations, battlefield defectors will be punished with capital punishment, so the two dolphins are immediately executed.
It can be seen that to become an animal agent, in addition to having some special skills, it is also necessary to be able to understand and respond to various complex human instructions, even if the simplest coordinate translation according to human instructions is not something that every animal can do.
Having said that, the transformation of animals must be extremely risky, and in the transformation of "dolphin torpedoes", the vast majority of dolphins lost their lives on the operating table. Even if they escaped the transformation, these animal agents needed a long period of special training before entering the battlefield, and they also faced the possibility of casualties on the battlefield. Dolphin "mutiny", according to later research may be a retaliatory behavior caused by long-term pressure. Animals and people can share the blessings, but there is no need to share difficulties.
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