To the United States Navy, one of the world's most intelligent creatures is no more than a highly sophisticated piece of military technology.

This month the Navy announced its plans to use warm-water dolphins and sea lions from California to protect Washington's Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base in the state's cold ocean.

Last month, however, the U.S. Defense Department granted the Navy permission to continue training with sonar for two more years, a move environmentalists and biologists widely recognize as harmful to marine mammals including dolphins.

Juxtaposing these two actions against each other reveals the audacity and callous disregard with which the Navy is treating the very creatures from which it hopes to enlist help.

The Navy plans to move California sea lions and Atlantic bottlenose dolphins from their San Diego training base to the Northwest's Puget Sound. Once acclimated to their new environment, the mammals will be used to alert Navy officials to the presence of the terrorist swimmers and divers that are apparently a threat to the area.

The sea lions have been trained to carry cuffs in their mouths that can be attached to an enemy swimmer's leg. Human teams reel in the rogue swimmer after the sea lion has left the vicinity.

The dolphins, on the other hand, use their sonar to patrol for terrorist swimmers. The animals drop a beacon in the water to notify humans of a suspicious presence.

The Navy has a long history of using marine mammals for military action, according to NationalGeographic.com, which reports that dolphins were used as mine detectors as late as 2003 in Iraq's Umm Qasr, located on the Persian Gulf. The animals are trained through the Marine Mammal Program, which began in 1960 and was declassified in 1992.

To the Navy's credit, the marine mammals are removed from the water before human teams are sent in to deal with potentially dangerous divers. Additionally, the Navy has done tests with dolphins and sea lions in the cold waters of Alaska and Scandinavia to test the animals' abilities to cope in frigid waters.

However, when these seemingly kind acts of empathy for the dolphins and sea lions are seen in the light of Navy sonar tests, what becomes apparent is the military's disregard for the welfare of animals. The small kindness shown to the creatures is merely an effort to ensure the Navy gets its money's worth out of the dolphins as a line of defense.

The Navy has underwater sonar training ranges off the coasts of Hawaii and Southern California and along the East Coast. These areas are home to hundreds of species of sea life, including blue, gray and humpback whales and several species of dolphins and porpoises.

And while Navy weaponry and technology tests are undeniably important — especially in today's heightened military climate — safeguards need to be put in place to protect the very marine mammals the Navy is drafting into service.

Instead of agreeing to what seem like reasonable environmental requests, the Navy will continue testing the technology that has been directly linked to beached whales and dolphins. In any other situation that questions the environmental wisdom of a government action, a project is stopped until an environmental impact study is completed.

Not so in the Navy's case, due to an exemption allowed under the 2004 National Defense Authorization Act.

The provisions requested by California's Coastal Commission that the Navy has decided to ignore include an avoidance of key marine mammal habitat, such as the gray whale migration routes and a requirement to cease testing at nighttime when whales are hard to spot, according to the National Resources Defense Council. The Navy will only agree to submit any monitoring reports it prepares to the commission.

What this amounts to is the Navy placing its own priorities as the supreme matter of importance. When marine mammals like dolphins can be useful for national defense, their welfare becomes a top priority. But, when the welfare of those same animals gets in the way of another Navy project, then their well-being loses importance.

Forget, for just a moment, the sheer paranoia that is being exhibited by the U.S. Navy when it thinks dolphins will be able to stop a terrorist attack. Ignore, too, the fact that the dolphins are being removed from warm temperatures and placed in an unnatural climate. I swam with a dolphin in the cold waters of Ireland's Atlantic two summers ago, and while the mammals will be able to survive, the conditions are not ideal.

The real problem here is the way the Navy is exploiting some of the world's most evolved creatures. Animals have a right to more than just a miserable existence, which is all the Navy's exploitation amounts to. They are incredibly smart pack creatures that suffer tremendously when placed in captivity. Dolphins are not domesticated like dogs or horses; they are not meant to live their lives in captivity.

Nothing gives humans the right to remove these animals from their natural habitat and then force them to go to war for us, an activity that is foreign to dolphins and sea lions.

Just as war veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, dolphins, too, are mentally and often physically damaged once they finally retire. When the Marine Mammal Program was declassified and downsized in 1992, the working dolphins were bought by entertainment acts or sent to sanctuaries that tried to rehabilitate the creatures.

Two of the dolphins, Luther and Buck, were released into the wild with some controversy surrounding whether they were fully ready. Both dolphins were recaptured less than two weeks later after they were found begging for food at local piers. Both were found injured and emaciated. Some retired dolphins also displayed symptoms of stress and agitation when faced with a human presence, showing that their military duties were a source of trauma.

Not only is the exploitation wrong, it is fallible. These animals simply do not understand the vital nature of the work they are being asked to do. Marking water terrorists is merely a game to these animals, not a matter of life and death.

While the Navy's Marine Mammal Program may make a big show about caring after these animals, the fact that it regularly is responsible for the harm and death of marine mammals says otherwise. Humans need to learn to fight their own wars and leave other innocent species out of it.

Reach columnist Amy Korst at amykorst@thedaily.washington.edu.