[LizardQueen]

Personally, I have an issue with animals being trained to kill humans by delivering bombs, etc. It seems sort of like giving bombs to kids and telling them to go blow people up.

Killing shouldn't be done lightly, or unconsciously, which is how animals and kids would do it since they don't know what's going on and can't give a valid informed consent.

However, in this case and in the case of rescue dogs the animals are saving people's lives, not taking them. There's no moral quandary there.

The only issue is the safety of the critter, and any rescue dog handler can tell you that the safety of their dog is paramount. From what I've read these dolphin handlers are doing their utmost to keep their Flippers safe - they don't mark the mine itself, just set a flag near it.

So PETA needs to shut up.

LQ

[Unknowing]

Sorry for the glibness of my facile response.

Yes, using animals to deliver violence, or putting sentient (pain-feeling) animals into great risk would be a different kind of ethical question. I guess PETA is against carnivorial heterotrophism (meat-eating) because they feel or reason that sentient animals have natural-law rights protecting the animals against assault.

But using the trained dolphins to locate the mines does not present a great risk to the animals, and they're not delivering violence. There's no evidence that the dolphins could make an informed choice about whether to "volunteer" for military service. The dolphins seem to cooperate a lot with humans, and they seem to make affirmative moral choices when they have rescued swimmers or mariners. But the dolphins are carnivores, which PETA would say is wrong.

Just because the dolphins did not "volunteer" does not mean that they are slaves; just because the dolphins are trained wild animals does not mean that they are free.