Richard L. Holt

Rhode Island Red Hen and Rooster

Before starting the position with the dolphins, I first had to be certified as a Navy diver.  I was sent to school in San diego and returned with that certification.

OK, so I have gained the certification of a qualified Navy diver, I have been certified as an Underwater Instructor, and I am ready to find out what these animals called Dolphins are all about.  So what in the world is a Rhode Island Red chicken doing on this web page.  Well, we in the first group to work with Dolphin found out very quickly.  We were not going to be allowed to work with the magnificent animal of the seas until we learned to work and train animals, and the choice of the Animal Training people out of Arkansas that were hired by the Navy was the chicken.  We were to have our own individual chicken which we would learn to train for two or three weeks before we could even get near the dolphin animal.

While facilities for the dolphin training were being built on the beach at Point Mugu, we went to another set of buildings also on the beach and were assigned our chicken.  Mine was a beautiful hen which I promptly named Esmeralda which I also called my old Dodge car I drove to work.  I quickly learned the ropes from some very good instructors.  I could get Esmeralda to jump up and down, first on one leg, and then the other.  I could get her to dance for me.  I could even get her to do a forward flip and land on her feet.  I would have never thought I would be doing this kind of thing, but there I was, training a chicken with a degree in Physics!

Dolphin enjoying its pen

It was clear from the onset of the program that the interest of the Navy was in the application of the capabilities of the dolphin in naval warfare.  Did the dolphin have something special in its echo location system, and if so how did it work?  Could the dolphin be taught to work for the navy on assigned projects?  Would the dolphin be able to take over some of the responsibilities now being done by navy divers?  How did the dolphin dive so deep and remain so long?  Was there something unique in its physiological systems to allow this to happen, and if so, could that be harnessed for use by the navy? 

We had a tough time finding dolphins in captivity.  There just weren't any.  Those that we found were from fishermen that had these animals fouled in their nets and had taken them to shore only to kill them and untangle the nets.  They were a nuisance to the fishermen.  But we found some.  Three as a matter of fact.  Two large holding tanks (pools) were built at Point Mugu with another above ground holding tank.  In addition, the lagoon right next to the sand spit where the project was to work was a perfect place to build holding pens where the animals could be contained for long periods of time in semi-clear water.  None of the water at Point Mugu except the ocean was very good, but the planners put the facility there anyway.  This was to be a major problem and as a result, some very good and hard to find animals were lost to various diseases and pneumonia during that first year or two of operation.

Dolphin in the open oceans

We had no textbooks at the beginning - no one had ever worked with dolphin before we began.  We didn't know what their normal temperature should even be.  When an animal got sick, we wanted to check it out.  Where did we start?  So it was experiment after experiment to learn.  We wrote everything down so that others would also know what we were learning.  Every move we made or that the animals made, we wrote down.

Taking an animal's temperature, for example, was a real effort the first few times.  We decided that we didn't know what the normal temperature should be of a healthy animal, so we make a decision to take the temperature of one of our dolphin to find out.  How do we do that?  We knew how to do the same thing to a horse, or a dog, so why not a dolphin.  Well, no one had ever done it. 

We had no thermometer to use on these marine mammals, so we devised one using one that was for horses.  We taped a piece of twine to the thermometer and attached a float on the other end of it in case we lost it.  What we didn't figure on was where to put the thing in the animal.  We had not done this before.  Where was the rectum?  Sounds simple, doesn't it?  It wasn't!  We made a serious mistake with our first choice of an animal to do this testing with.  We chose a female, and quickly found that confused the issue even more.  I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say that the female had an extra opening on her bottom that we hadn't counted on, and she had a fantastic muscle around that opening that we tried to get through and couldn't!  That was the way she protected herself from the males if she didn't want to be bred.  We didn't know that! 

And how did we hold the animal still after we determined where to put the thermometer in it.  We had to physically hold the animal upside down and keep the blowhole out of the water while going through these exercises.  What a chore that was!  There are many funny stories to tell about this and I present them during lectures on the dolphin. 

Besides giving this lecture on the beginnings of studying dolphins to guests on cruise ships, we also give this lecture to kids and adults in the Southern California area and they love it.  I put my photos on Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and they are beautiful.  I have even been asked to give this lecture to many Navy groups who had no idea that the Navy was involved in the beginnings of using dolphins for many reasons, and now that the animal has become so popular as an entertainer, there is even more interest in what we had to go through to learn about them.

Huge Pod of Dolphins

We had to learn the living habits of the dolphin in its natural environment.  We didn't know what they ate, so we went out in our little rubber boats to the islands just off shore from Point Mugu and watched them.  We got in the water with them, in the middle of a large pod while they were eating, we watched and learned.  They accepted us without any problem.  They would come up to us and greet us and then go about their business.

The dolphin research program was highly classified, but still people came from all over the U.S. to see what we were doing with the dolphin.  That first two years was spent working with the animals, teaching them and leaning from them how and why they operated.  They were fun to work with.  They responded well, but we quickly found that they preferred to work with only one person.  Not too good since when and if they went into the fleet they would be working with Navy SEALS, and might see different handlers as time went by.  We learned how to work around this.

We also wanted to see if we could control them in the open sea.  If we took them out in a boat, launched the animal, put it through some of the planned tasks, would it come back to us or take off and rejoin the many pods that were always around the Point Mugu area?  They did come back although we had a few that took their time!

We lost some animals during this time to death by diseases that we knew little about.  We learned about their health care needs, and discovered that we were able to train them to hold still for brushing of their teeth, taking blood samples from them, and many other things that we had to do.  We had no portable equipment for taking x-rays.  We had very little equipment that was thought of to be used with an animal in a water environment.  But those problems were solved.

Photos on the left side below are thumbnails.  Click on them to get a full view of the photo.  Thanks.

After the program was transferred out of Point Mugu, to Hawaii, and then to San Diego, the time came to test these animals with Navy SEALS in the real war situations that they would find themselves working as a team.  The dolphins came through in grand fashion.  They accepted different handlers, different climatic conditions, different feeding routines and a lot of other things that at the first, we did not know they might accept.

Today these animals are routinely transferred around the world as they are needed.  Along with their SEAL handlers and trainers, they perform many tasks that man is unable to do.  They are magnificent at the very least.

I could write a book on all the things that were done by the dolphins, and all the many scientific and technical things that were learned about these magnificent animals.  I don't have the room to do that here, but suffice it to say, that the work we started in 1961 opened the door to the use of dolphins not only for military purposes, but also began the explosion of dolphin facilities all over the U.S. and in foreign countries.  Now one can go almost anywhere and view dolphins being put through their paces.  What a wonderful animal this is, and it still thrills me to watch them.

As the research and development program went into its second year, all the dolphin we had were now dead and the Navy reached a point in their budget where it was questionable if they were going to continue even though the program had produced some fantastic results.  Everyone was in agreement at all levels in the Navy that the use of these wonderful and helpful animals had to continue, but when was the question.

FPS-16 Radars. Telemetry and Command Systems at Point Mugu for the Naval Missile Test Center

One of the key things I had already learned in working within the Federal System, even the U.S. Army, was that you had to be flexible so that you could respond to the needs of the organization that you were assigned to work for.  In this case, the Dolphin Program had ground to a halt.  We had highly qualified people that found themselves without a daily task to perform.  We had to find positions for everyone until such a time as the funding was approved by the Department of the Navy to continue the Dolphin research work.

I was very lucky.  I had all the qualifications to perform a large number of jobs on the Pacific Missile Range and the Naval Missile Test Center.  Of all those offered to me, I chose to take on the job of the Head of the Engineering Section for all the Range Operations systems used on a daily basis for the test and evaluation of a large variety of missile systems.

On board the Range were radars that I was totally familiar with having used the very same radars in the Army, telemetry systems that I had also worked with, command and control systems which were very similar to those used by the Army, and communications and data processing systems that were also very familiar to me.  I fit.  I was assigned to the job pending the start again of the Dolphin Program.  I thought it was great. And along with the job came a promotion, GS-12 which I had achieved in not quite three years of working for the Navy.  This in itself was a marvel and many people commented on this rapid rise in the Civil Service structure.

And again, little did I have any idea that this little change was going to make a huge difference in what was just around the corner for me.  I was offered the position as the Head of the Engineering Section for all the instrumentation on the Pacific Missile Range, responsible for the radars, telemetry, command systems, communications and data handling systems at Point Mugu, Point Arguelo, San Nicholas Island and Wake Island.  I had worked with the same radars in the Army, so this was not something new.  But to now have the responsibility for all the data collection equipment was a major step for me. 

I inherited a super bunch of engineers and technicians who took me under their wing and taught me a lot that I didn't know.  I was located right in the Range Operations building where all the command and control of all the testing out over the range took place.  Very exciting place to be!  And I should add here too that from this very same bunch of engineers and technicians that I inherited in this Section, I recruited several of them to go with me to the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston after I accepted that job.  They were a perfect fit for positions I had there under my management responsbility.

But wouldn't you know it, about six months into this job, my Navy bosses came to me and asked me if I would consider going back to school during this lull in the dolphin program, and at full Navy expense, would I like to go to Texas A&M School of Oceanography and get my Doctorate in Oceanography.    Wow!  I couldn't believe it.  I had done well and had all kind of accolades from my work on the program, but this was almost more than I could handle.  Of course it took me about 5 seconds to respond.  I was going to school.  So I packed up my car with what few things I had, put the rest in storage, and was on my way.  This of course after being accepted at Texas A&M into their graduate school, which I did get.  The school had everything set up for me.  A nice place to live included.  So off I went in the late summer of 1962 headed to College Station, Texas and A&M.  Little did I know what lay ahead for me!

I've got to stick in here these words though.  The Dolphin Program was funded in 1963 and has continued to this day (2006) moving from Point Mugu to San Diego through another few stops.  It has produced terrific results and is a well thought-of program within the ranks of the Navy.  At San Diego is a full-blown facility where the animals are housed in pens built right out into San Diego Bay and every passing cruise ship goes right these pens without knowing that they are there, except for ships I am on, in which case I always point out the pens to the guests on board.  And the other part I feel good about is that we were the first.  Now you can almost go anywhere in the world and they have Dolphin shows going on of one sort or the other.  You can swim with dolphins under controlled conditions as well.  But we led the way.

If you'd like to see how I got from this exciting position in the Navy's Dolphin Program to one of man's greatest endeavors, going into space, go to my next exciting professional position with NASA at the Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas