Do You Believe That Animals Held In Captivity Can Be Safely Released In The Wild?

Marmaris, Turkey (CNN) -- For more than a year,
experts have been at work in a quiet cove on the Aegean Sea, teaching a
pair of male bottlenose dolphins how to catch their own food. Every day,
the team releases dozens of live fish into giant sea pen where the
dolphins named Tom and Misha live.

The two males then race
around the pen, diving, darting and somersaulting down to depths of 45
feet in pursuit of their frightened prey. Like a proud father, trainer
Jeff Foster watches from the narrow dock that encircles the pen.

Not long ago, he said, Tom and Misha had no idea what to do with live fish.

"We had literally
thousands of fish in the pen, and they just wouldn't look at them,"
Foster said. "They had just been so used to being hand-fed in a captive
situation that they did not recognize fish as a food source."

When Foster first met the
dolphins more than a year ago, he said they would only eat if humans
placed dead fish directly in their mouths. If fish was thrown into the
pen, it would go untouched and end up rotting at the bottom of the sea
pen.

Both dolphins were in failing health when wildlife activists discovered them at a run-down tourist park in 2010.

Tom and Misha are part of the Back to the Blue project, an expensive, risky and somewhat controversial experiment to reintroduce captive animals into the wild.

"It would be like taking
your dog and releasing it into the woods," Foster said. "If you don't
prepare your dog for that, it would never happen."

Foster, a Seattle-based
expert on marine mammals, had experience with another high-profile
release program that ultimately ended in failure.

More than 10 years ago,
he worked in Iceland as part of a multimillion-dollar effort to prepare
the killer whale Keiko from the 1993 movie "Free Willy" for release into
the wild. Less than a year after his release, Keiko died off Norway.

But Foster said he believes Tom and Misha stand a much better chance of survival.

"These animals haven't
been in captivity as long as Keiko," he said. "Keiko was held in
captivity for more than 20 years. He was held as a solitary animal for
many of those years."

The two dolphins, who are both about 12 years old, have been in captivity for five or six years, he said.

"They've probably spent
the majority of their life out in the wild," Foster said. "Because we're
dealing with two males, you can develop competition feeding with them.
... They're ideal candidates for reintroduction back into the wild."

Dolphin parks, like the one where Misha and Tom were found, are prevalent in Turkey, although not fully regulated.

Tom and Misha first
attracted the attention of wildlife conservation activists in 2010. At
the time, they were kept at a Turkish resort, where tourists paid to
swim with the dolphins in a shallow, filthy swimming pool.

"The pool in Hisaronu,
Turkey, where Tom and Misha had spent the summer months of 2010 had such
a high bacterial count ... that it was a significant health hazard to
the dolphins and for the unsuspecting tourists who paid to swim with
them," Shirley Galligan, a representative of the Born Free Foundation,
wrote in an e-mail to CNN. "The water was filthy with feces and dead
fish and a layer of 'sludge' at the bottom."

According to Born Free, a
nonprofit conservation group based in the United Kingdom, the dolphins
were underweight and listless and would not have survived much longer in
the pool, which "having been hastily constructed, was in danger of
collapse from subsidence."

A coalition of
environmental groups successfully campaigned to rescue the animals and
transport them in the back of a truck to a sea pen in the Aegean.

Born Free has taken over
the costly and time-consuming program to rehabilitate Tom and Misha. So
far, the effort has cost $800,000.

Both dolphins are
expected to be released within a matter of days. Born Free is keeping
the exact time and location of their release secret to protect the
animals from curious human visitors, excessive boat traffic and the
threat of poachers.

Tom and Misha's progress
will be monitored with specially designed satellite tracking devices
that will be pinned to their dorsal fins.

Even the sponsors of the program admit there is no guarantee of success.

"There have only been a
handful of reintroduction (programs) with mixed results," Galligan
wrote. "Returning any captive wild animal to the wild is never without
risk."

One of the only
successful cetacean reintroductions on record involved an orphaned
female orca named Springer. Foster was a member of the team that helped
rehabilitate the emaciated animal and eventually reintroduce her to a
pod of related killer whales off Canada's Pacific coast a decade ago. She has reportedly survived and thrived in those waters.

Michael Moore, a marine mammal expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, predicted major challenges for Tom and Misha in the weeks and months ahead.

"Can they break the bond
with humans, and can they create a bond with other (wild) dolphins?" he
asked in a phone interview with CNN.

"The irony is that if
these animals do get released into the wild, it's a big, bad world out
there, and they will have to learn how not to get entangled in fishing
gear."

According to Moore, Tom
and Misha's release will have virtually no impact on the world's wild
dolphin population, which faces an onslaught from industrial fishing
nets, decimated fish stocks and polluted seas.

But he and other dolphin
experts say successful reintroduction could both increase biodiversity
awareness in Turkey and set an important example for the multimillion-dollar captive marine mammal entertainment industry.

There has been a rapid
increase in the number of dolphinariums and "swim-with-dolphin" programs
cropping up across Turkey over the last decade.

Do you believe that Animals that have been in captivity can be safely released

in the wild?