Drunken pair fined £750 for 'interfering' with Dave the celebrity dolphin in early morning swim

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It started as a drunken dip in the sea with Dave the Dolphin after an all-night party.

Yesterday, ten months on, it ended in the dock and a guilty verdict after a trial costing more than £20,000.

Michael Jukes, 27, and Daniel Buck, 26, are the first people to be convicted of interfering with a dolphin after the court heard they touched and stroked the creature.

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Dave the dolphin - who is really female - plays with swimmers off the Folkestone coast. Two men have been found guilty of disturbing her under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981

The pair stripped off and dived into the water to splash about with the six-year-old bottlenose on their return home from a night out with friends in Sandgate near Folkestone in Kent.

The wild dolphin, which is actually female, had already gained celebrity status in the area since arriving the previous summer.

Buck, a civil engineer, and Jukes, a pipe fitter, were convinced that the animal was enjoying herself as much as they were during the 5am swim last June 9.

Jukes told Dover Magistrates' Court: "It was approaching us. We were touching it, but not in an aggressive way. I was not hurting it.

"It was an amazing experience."

Buck said: "Someone suggested going for a swim. Dave went underneath me, then came up beside me and was there looking at me. It turned on its back as if to be stroked. I stroked its belly."

As they played around in the water, Buck is said to have shouted with delight: "People pay hundreds of pounds to do this in Florida and I'm doing it in Folkestone."

Police arrived following complaints about the noise but at first the men refused to return to the shore.

Witnesses told officers the men had been unduly rough with the dolphin.

One filmed the encounter and experts from the Marine Animal Rescue Coalition who studied the footage told the court that Dave showed obvious signs of distress.

But Dr Horace Dobbs, who has studied dolphins for 45 years, insisting the film showed that Dave was pleased to be in their company.

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Convicted: Michael Dukes, left, and Donald Buck 'disturbed' Dave the dolphin

He said: "She enjoyed it. She was the master of the situation - it was her domain."

Julian Rixon, defending Buck, warned the case could lead to prosecutions for scooping a water beetle from a pond or walking through a field with crickets in it.

He said: "What's next, fish? Reptiles?

"It is quite clear that Parliament did not want people to be prosecuted for this sort of offence except in the clearest of cases."

But John Offord, the chairman of the bench, ruled that while the men had not deliberately disturbed the dolphin they had acted recklessly.

Jukes and Buck, who are both from Folkestone, looked shocked as the guilty verdict was read out.

They are the first people to be convicted for disturbing a dolphin under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

They were sentenced to 120 hours of work in the community and ordered to pay £350 each in costs.

Dave has not been seen since November and is feared to have died after an accident in which a third of her tail was chopped off.

 

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