There have been rumors that cetaceans have also been employed as dolphin drones, remote deliverers of death. During the Vietnam War, it was claimed that dolphins were used in lethal “swimmer nullification programs,” their beaks fitted with needles to deliver fatal injections of carbon dioxide gas to Vietcong divers. The Navy denies the stories.

Dr. Burnett notes that the use of cetaceans, imagined and otherwise, in acts of warfare fed the “countercultural tensions” that surrounded cetaceans during the 1960s and ’70s, contributing to the way they became the “totemic organisms of peaceniks, freaks, and ecoterrorists.” He also points out that the most notorious name in dolphin studies — John C. Lilly, who proposed that the marine mammals spoke “dolphinese,” and experimented by dosing them with LSD — drew on research done by the Navy for much of his controversial work.

We humans, it seems, can’t leave the natural world alone. Assuming our biblical rights of dominion, we must reshape the world in our image. So, on one hand, whales and dolphins can be sleek and cute, the stuff of Flipper and Free Willy. On the other, their intelligence can be used to do our dirty work. If man may be venal and warlike, so, too, must be his animal servants.

There’s a delicate moral dilemma here. We know that these are intelligent animals, with advanced social skills. Bottlenose dolphins have signature whistles that act as “names.” Dolphins can use their sonar to read one another’s physical states and, possibly, emotional moods. Some dolphins and larger whales possess spindle neurons, specialized brain cells found elsewhere only in great apes, elephants and humans, creating the capacity for empathy and self-awareness — and, perhaps, the ability to feel love and loss.

Scientists posit that cetaceans exhibit moral behavior and have a collective sense of one another’s individuality. And as the esteemed scientists Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell describe in their forthcoming book, “The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins,” they may be said to possess culture as a result of longstanding social skills, passed down through generations. In their apparently carefree lives, cetaceans appeal to us in our less buoyant existence. Their supposed benevolence is part of our culture, in myths from ancient Greece and from the Haida and Maori people, up to present-day stories of dolphins protecting humans from sharks.