Sea Lion Trainer Says Navy Program Risks Human Lives : Animal rights: A former employee of the project charges that marine mammals are unreliable in military duties. A spokesman says the service has complete faith in the secret endeavor.

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 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 Oceans Systems Center in San Diego, said that 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 Veterans 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 trains sea lions at the Los Angeles Zoo, said that while working for the naval center in 1986 and 1987 he learned of several instances during which animals dropped or bumped into “potentially dangerous classified objects” or 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 the center, 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.”

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 the exact role the mammals played, but animal rights advocates charge that the dolphins are being fitted with snout-mounted explosive devices.

“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.”

Reames 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 would 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 admitted, he submitted a bogus abstract for a paper on the history of marine mammals in captivity. When he rose to speak, 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 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. He found no takers.

“I think they thought I was an animal rights person,” he said. “But I think some animal ‘abuses’ have been a little sensationalized. The Navy is making improvements.”

LaPuzza said he could not divulge details about how dolphins might be used, but said Reames was 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.”