Rough day to be a hippie, I tells ya’:

It started out as a day with so much joy and hope but officials with the Clearwater Marine Aquarium say it ended in heartache.

Just three hours after releasing a bottlenose dolphin back into the wild, it was attacked by sharks and euthanized a short time later.

“We’re at a loss for words,” said Diane Young with the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.

Dunham, as the dolphin was called, turned up last December near Anclote Key. Officials say he was sick and emaciated, but after months of rehab he was ready to be returned to the Gulf.

This is what happens when feel-good liberals get involved with nature, or any other cause, for that matter. They have the best intentions, to be sure, but they end up just spending a lot of money and nothing good comes of it. Imagine how much money they spent rescuing this dolphin, only to see him eaten mere seconds after returning to the ocean. Money down the drain, but hey, at least they feel good about themselves, right?

That’s the problem with knee-jerk liberals. They want to help the homeless, they want to help AIDs victims, they want to help the poor, etc., but all they end up doing is throwing a bunch of money down the toilet and, more often than not, making the problem worse.

As for what should have been done with this dolphin, my suggestion would be that since they spent that much money on the little guy, they should have put him in a place like Sea World or whatever. Make him work it off by doing flips, dives, and whatever cute stuff dolphins do that make hippies think they’re so damn brilliant (the dolphins, not the hippies). He’d have been fed regularly, cared for and, best of all, he wouldn’t have been lunch for a bigger fish.

BTW, I know that leftist animal rights groups and other run-of-the-mill liberals would take issue with keeping the dolphin in captivity, but isn’t it ironic that the things they object to for animals (that they are under someone else’s control, relying on strangers to care for, feed, and shelter them, etc.) are the very things they want for humans in our society? They object to animals being dependent on humans (by being held in captivity), yet they have no problem with making the poor, minorities, or whatever group, into wards of the state.