A specialist explained that when these animals are stranded it is because they are injured and returning them to the water drowns them.
The U.S. Marine National Fisheries Service Law Enforcement Office is offering a reward of up to $20,000 to anyone who can help identify beachgoers who stalked a stranded dolphin to death on Quintana Beach, Texas.
On April 10, a woman called the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network to report that a dolphin, first seen in the sand, was surrounded by a crowd pushing it into the water.
Heidi Whitehead, executive director of the aforementioned organization, told The Washington Post that this is common, since “unfortunately, people think they are doing the right thing and try to push the mammal into the water.”
However, according to the official, when a dolphin is stranded on the beach, it is usually injured or sick and might have difficulty breathing, so it might drown if pushed back into the water.
Whitehead said a staff member advised the woman caller to ask the crowd to bring the animal to shore and provide assistance by keeping it wet and giving it space until rescuers arrived. However, the bathers pushed the animal under the water, surrounded it and placed their children on top to make “as if they were riding a dolphin”.
By the time rescuers reached the beach where the dolphin was sighted, the mammal was no longer breathing. Thus, in Whitehead’s words, “the rescue operation became a recovery mission.”
Whitehead and his team collected the carcass of the animal to perform a necropsy in his laboratory. The autopsy showed that the mammal drowned.
Whitehead lamented the situation, stating that “it’s one thing when citizens have good intentions and try to push back the dolphin because they don’t know it’s not right, but this is a completely different situation, because it’s harassment”, an act that according to she is “totally unforgivable.”
“The hardest part for me and my staff was just thinking regarding the suffering that this animal undoubtedly endured in its last few minutes of life,” he said.
Dolphins in the United States are covered by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Anyone found guilty of harassing, harming, feeding or killing wild dolphins can be fined up to $100,000 or face up to a year in jail for violation
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