Examentrainers

Killer dolphins help children

Mark Franchetti Moscow AT the height of the cold war, base 99727 at Bukhta Kazachya on the Crimean peninsula1) was one of the most hidden military compounds in the former Soviet Union. Behind its high walls, military experts taught dozens of dolphins to locate enemy vessels and plant explosives on their hulls. Those days are gone. In a sign of more peaceful times, some of the “killer” dolphins have been retrained to play with children suffering psychological problems in a project said to offer promising results. Every day several children troop into the base past armed guards, now controlled by the Ukrainian military, and are lowered to the waiting dolphins in the Black Sea. Supervised by doctors and specialist trainers, they then have the opportunity to play and swim with the animals, whose clicks and rhythmic motions are believed to be therapeutic.

“We first understood that dolphins have such therapeutic qualities at the end of the 1980s,” said Lyudmilla Lukina, the centre’s chief doctor. “It has become so popular that we now have a one-year waiting list. The whole exercise calms the children down and helps them to deal with their problems.” More than 2,000 children - ranging from the autistic to the merely shy - have passed through the base. The courses could not have come at a better time for base 99727. When the Ukrainians took over the complex after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a chronic lack of funding left the centre’s 70 dolphins facing a bleak future: each animal eats 40lbs of fish a day and their upkeep was no longer seen as a priority by the Ukrainian navy. Now, at £15 a session, the dolphin therapy is a potentially lucrative business. The method has become so effective that Colonel Alexander Borshchyov, deputy commander of the base, hopes to use it with Russian military officers suffering stress after serving in Chechnya. The Sunday Times

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