Deaf Whales, Dumb People

I am a former military officer now working as a contractor in the oil and gas industry.  


Those of you in the marine mammal conspiracy business can stop reading now, as you have probably already fingered me as part of the conspiracy. That's right, I'm bought and paid for by the military and big oil, who somehow are able to get everybody at every whale stranding and every researcher to lie to the media, and protect the public from the shocking truth, all to kill whales for a tidy profit cause they JUST DON'T CARE. (evil laughter)


Let's start off with a few basic assumptions.  Let's say that naval sonar harms marine life, and seismic exploration does too. This is more theory than hard science, but let's say that it does anyway. Let's say that the merits of the environmentalist case vs. the training needs of the Navy have already been heard by the Supreme Court and it didn't go well for the environmentalists.  Let's say that the evil Navy and big oil all employ marine mammal observers whose function is to shut down the sonar and seismic surveying any time marine mammals are detected.  Because they do.  Finally, let's say that marine mammals who encounter offensive seismic and sonar activity go the other way and leave the area.  This is called a flight response, and it can be found throughout nature, though it never shows up in any stories about underwater noise.   


Now I'm not a marine biologist, or a whale specialist, I'm just a dumb guy who flies helicopters.  So riddle me this.  


I have been on a seismic boat, traveling in a miles-wide circle with many other boats, all performing seismic surveying.  These boats do maybe 5 knots wide open during the survey, in a circle, and the circle is slowly sliding across the water, air guns blazing all the while.  Meanwhile, as I am on the boat, a pilot whale and some dolphins swim right by the bridge, directly for the air guns, which results in the marine mammal observer shutting down the survey.  It is not as if the boats snuck up on the mammals or ran them down, even the pilot whale can make near 20 knots in a pinch.  My question is...


1. Are these whales STUPID?
2. Are these whales DEAF?
3. Has all this seismic activity rendered the whales sense of direction completely useless, as the conspiracy states?  
4. Or maybe, just maybe, does all this seismic activity NOT affect the whales and the dolphins as severely as the environmentalists state?


I really don't know.  But I know that environmentalists will soundly reject item #4, though their superior intellect and scientific backing still can't provide more than anecdotal arguments to support their theories, which all conclude that the military and the oil industry are REAL BAD.  


Environmentalists hate both the military and big oil, and would like to see them both shut down or severely restricted for their sins against mother earth.  


Now there's a shocking truth for you.