Ex-Navy Trainer Attacks U.S. Use of Sea Animals : Military: His claims that dolphins and sea lions are unreliable and endanger servicemen are denied by Navy program’s spokesman.

Putting what he called a “conservative” spin on a familiar “liberal” animal-rights issue, a former Navy animal trainer charged Monday that the Navy’s use of marine mammals to perform military duties is unreliable and that it puts American servicemen--as well as national security--at risk.

David Reames, a civilian who spent nearly two years training sea lions for classified projects at the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, said that both sea lions and dolphins, while intelligent, cannot be depended upon in combat situations.

“It would be just as ridiculous if the Army trained chimpanzees to shoot AR-15s,” said Reames, who spoke at a Veteran’s Day protest organized by an advocacy group called Friends of Animals. “It’s not just an animal-rights issue--it’s a human rights issue. The liberals can talk about the animals’ rights. I’m concerned about human beings.”

Reames, who now trains sea lions at the Los Angeles Zoo, said that, during his time working for NOSC in 1986 and 1987, he learned of several instances during which animals dropped or bumped into “potentially dangerous classified objects” or simply disappeared. Marine mammals’ “inbred instinct to resist captivity” makes them impossible to control, he said--and therefore dangerous.

Tom LaPuzza, a Navy public affairs officer at NOSC, said the Navy has complete faith in the reliability of its classified marine mammal programs. In 30 years working with hundreds of dolphins, he said, “only six have gone AWOL--five of them during storms when they lost contact with the trainer.”

“The marine mammal systems are under much more rigid human control than people understand,” LaPuzza said. “Our statements of reliability have to do with how much control we have.”

Dolphins and sea lions are used in U.S. waters and were deployed to the Persian Gulf during U.S. tanker-escort operations in 1987, LaPuzza said. The Navy refuses to disclose exactly what role the mammals played, but animal-rights advocates charge that the dolphins have been fitted with snout-mounted explosive devices.

Reames first went public with his observations last week when he addressed a meeting of the International Marine Animal Trainers Assn. in Chicago. Concerned that the threat of war in the Persian Gulf might mean dolphins will be deployed again, he decided to come forward with as much information as he could without defying the oath of secrecy he took to obtain security clearance.

“I don’t want to see any animals I trained causing the deaths of American servicemen,” he said.

To win a place on the meeting’s agenda, Reames concedes, he submitted a bogus abstract for a paper on the history of marine mammals in captivity. When he rose to speak, however, he explained that he had changed the title of his paper to “Marine Mammals: America’s Unreliable Secret Weapon System.”

After reading the six-page paper, which he also distributed on Monday, he asked members of the trainers organization to sign a petition urging Congress to stop the use of marine mammals in military operations. But he found no takers.

LaPuzza said he could not divulge specific details about how dolphins might be used, but said Reames’ charges are not credible.

“We have two or three psychologists attached to the program telling me, ‘Yes, the animal is reliable.’ Then I’ve got a guy who works with a sea lion who says it’s not true,” he said. “David Reames trained sea lions. He did not train dolphins. But he says he knows how the dolphin system works. I don’t think he does.”

But, to illustrate his concerns, Reames listed eight examples he said he witnessed during training sessions in San Diego. As well as bumping into “classified objects,” he said, the marine mammals sometimes refused to perform the desired tasks.

One Navy dolphin that had been deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1987, he said, “was notorious for swimming away from his trainers and not returning to his holding pen until hours or days later.”

After a news conference, Reames attended a protest on San Diego’s Shelter Island, which animal-rights advocates pointed out was “as close as we could get” to NOSC headquarters. About 30 people gathered, displaying placards.

Zephyr Carlyle, the general counsel for Friends of Animals, said his group estimates that the Navy wastes more than $20 million a year on marine mammal operations. But LaPuzza said the actual bill for classified and unclassified marine programs comes to about $8 million a year.