• • •
Shamu is the generic name that SeaWorld applies to all of its performing orcas, taken from the original Shamu, a member of the Southern Resident orca community, who was captured as a calf near Tacoma when her mother was harpooned and dragged to Seattle by her captors. She died six years later, but her name lives on in the strange half-life of corporate marketing. In the end, Shamu and her successors, many of them also Southern Residents, made SeaWorld a multi-billion-dollar business. Thanks to the presence of their performing killer whales, the onetime backwater business of marine parks has blossomed into a big-money corporate undertaking of entertainment venues around which families plan their entire vacations.
I know this from personal experience. We took Fiona to Sea World in San Diego a couple of times when she was little—ages one and two, respectively. It was actually a lot of fun.
And you have to give credit where it is due; my little girl was flabbergasted and smitten by the sight of the great orcas, especially when they glided past the glass enclosure where she spent the better part of an hour ooh-ing and aah-ing over them. These parks deserve great credit for providing people the opportunity to actually see, in the flesh, one of these great creatures, but do they truly show orcas as they really are?
Those parks tell a different story about killer whales. They portray them as docile and friendly, like super-smart performing dogs. Although imposing and intimidating, they are clearly dominated by their human trainers. The parks claim to give their attendees an “education” and “conservation message” through their shows, although the information they give is often muddled and sometimes downright false. There is a lot of prattle about how much the whales eat and what it’s like to train them, but almost nothing about their social lives, their backgrounds, or their population type.
Fiona and Lisa at Sea World.
But most of all, you will never, ever hear about the endangered population of killer whales in the Pacific Northwest and most certainly not about the outsize role played by the captive-orca industry in driving those populations to the brink. Yes, mostly as a means of rationalizing the continued captivity of killer whales by theme parks, you may be told that whales face all kinds of survival challenges in the wild and often do not survive them. You will be told the oceans are a scary place (as proven by the difficulties whales face in Puget Sound) and that the parks can provide the whales better food and care than they can get in the wild. You will probably also be told that their orcas live longer in captivity than do whales in the wild.
These are at best gross distortions of reality, and the last is simply a lie. Captivity has been a catastrophe for most killer whales taken from the wild. Study after study has demonstrated that whales in captivity are more than two and a half times more likely to die than whales in the wild. All the care in the world cannot compensate for the stress brought on by placing a large, highly mobile, highly intelligent, and highly social animal with a complex life into a small concrete tank.
Of the 136 orcas taken in captivity from the wild over the years, only 13 still survive. The average lifespan in captivity so far is about eight and a half years. In the wild, the average rises to thirty-one years for males and forty-six for females. Then there is the upper end of the spectrum. In the wild, males will live up to sixty years, and in the Puget Sound, there is a matriarchal female named Granny who is believed to be a hundred years old. Having met Granny up close in my kayak, I can attest that she remains spry and playful. There are several other elderly females in the Southern Resident population. However, we don’t know how long orcas will live in captivity yet. We’re still finding that out.
Perhaps the most telling number is that, of those fifty-five orcas taken from the Pacific Northwest, only two remain alive today: Corky II, the matriarch of the Sea World orcas in San Diego, taken from Pender Harbor in 1969, and Lolita, also known as Tokitae, the only surviving orca from the horrific Penn Cove captures of 1970, who is alone in a small tank at Miami Seaquarium. Both are estimated to have been born in 1966, making them roughly co-equals as the oldest whales in captivity, although there are some estimates that indicate Lolita is older. Regardless, Corky has been captive longer than any living whale.
On our second visit to Sea World, we bought tickets for Fiona and her mom to go to the exclusive “Dine With Shamu” luncheon, where trainers bring whales up close to the tables where you’re noshing and give you a good look. The whale Fiona got to see up close was none other than Corky. I asked her afterward if she was excited to meet Corky up that close. She seemed noncommittal. Her mom told me that she seemed more taken aback than anything. “There was something disturbing about it,” she said.
Later that summer, we had our close encounter with orcas in the wild. That evening in camp, I asked Fiona if she had thought about those orcas at Sea World after seeing these in the wild. She said she had. I asked what her thoughts were. She paused for only a moment.
“They should let them go,” she said. Even a three-year-old could see it.
• • •
When you first enter the stadium at Miami Seaquarium where the killer whale Lolita does her twice-daily performances, you can stand at the railing and look up close at her enclosure. It is there that you are most overwhelmed by the indelible impression that this fifty-year-old semi-oval concrete tank, with its big concrete island in the middle, is way too small for a twenty-foot, four-ton orca, especially for four decades’ worth of captivity.
Lolita, aka Tokitae, eyes her admirers at the Miami Seaquarium.
Sometimes Lolita herself will come up to you while you stand there. She did so when I arrived early for the second show of the day. I was by myself, and she came up and looked directly at me, then rolled her head around, letting me take photographs, perhaps posing. As with so many resident fish-eating orcas, the abiding impression was of a powerful empathy. After a while, I stopped shooting and just stood there at the railing, watching her watching me. Soon I found myself almost overwhelmed with feelings of affection, of caring, for this whale. She just looked back, but when a whale looks back, it’s not the same as when, say, a dog or a cat looks back.
A Brazilian man sidled up next to me, and we began chatting about Lolita. I told him she was about forty-seven years old and had been in that very tank we were looking at for nearly forty-four years. He did a double take. “Really? Isn’t this tiny for an animal this big?”
I smiled. “Yes,” I said. “That’s a problem.” I said no more. The docents were listening, and I didn’t want to be thrown out.
A killer whale petroglyph carved by Makah tribal watchmen, at Wedding Rock on the coastal Olympic Peninsula.
CHAPTER Two
The People Under the Sea
THE ORCAS WERE WELL KNOWN TO THE NATIVE AMERICANS WHO occupied the Northwest Coast. They shared these waters and the fish that swam in them. Harming orcas was universally taboo for these people. While many of these tribes avidly hunted humpback and fin whales, it was considered bad medicine to injure or kill a “blackfish,” who at the least was a harbinger of plentiful fish and often much more. It was widely believed that if one killed an orca, its family would wreak vengeance on you and your kinsmen the next time you took to the water. Orcas were not mere beasts, but the people who lived under the sea.
Most of these tribesmen believed in a realm parallel to ours occupied by spirits, many of whom were people who lived in spirit villages rather resembling the natives’ own large cedar dwellings. Foremost among these spirits were the killer whale people, whose powers were immense and far-reaching. This was why so many tribes claimed the killer whales as their spiritual totem and carved the creature’s likeness into their totem poles and family crests. At times, the killer whale would meld with other creatures, especially wolves; they were often described as being the wolves’ seagoing counterparts. One of the most fearsome mythical creatures, the Wasgo, was half wolf and half killer whale. The orcas’ only predator was the great Thunderbird, which was large enough
to cart off orcas and great whales and other creatures; there appears to have been only one of those at any given time.
According to the myths of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribes of northern Vancouver Island (also known as the Kwakiutl), the first men were killer whales who came to shore, transformed into land creatures, and then forgot to go back. Some of their tribal elders claimed direct descent from killer whale tribes. Their word for killer whale, Max’inuxw, means “the ones who hunt.” In this mythology, the killer whale is the lord of the underwater realm. His house can be reached by four days’ journey out to the open sea, and his village is at the head of a long narrow inlet. The dolphins are his warriors, and he sends out his messenger and slave, the sea lion, with the king’s four quartz, pointed wedges, mystical devices that can never be blunted even when used to split stone.
“Our people have a great respect for the whales, because our belief is that they are our ancestors,” says Andrea Cranmer, a storyteller with the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe in Alert Bay, British Columbia (B.C.), near the northern end of Johnstone Strait. “They come and visit us, usually, at the beginning of a potlatch, if the family is descended from the whales, the Max’inuxw, the killer whale. Also, it’s a dance in the potlatch. Living on the island, they don’t show up every day, but when they do show up, we’re like tourists, too. We’re excited to see the ancestors. And when you see the dorsal fins, when the big dorsal fin comes out, and we know how old they are? It is just exciting to see, because it’s so massive. And there’s usually a pod—there’s usually not just one whale. So you see a whole family of whales, and it just makes you all excited.”
For nearly all Northwest tribesmen, including the Haida, the killer whale embodied the spiritual and physical power of the ocean. In various myths, humans come into contact with them and emerge with vast spiritual powers themselves.
One legend tells of a boy who, alone at sea in a storm, is thrown from his small canoe and swept underwater. There, under a strange sky, he encounters a village occupied by even stranger men, huge and black in the face. The villagers welcome him as the son of a chief and invite him to partake of their fire and the salmon on which they are feasting. Afterward, they all dance together and teach one another their tribal dances. As the festivities wind down, the strange chief tells the boy that he knows the boy wants to return to his home and commands him to close his eyes and take hold of the chief’s staff. The boy does so, eyes tightly shut, and finds himself grasping the great fin of a killer whale and rising upward. He awakens on the pebbly shore in front of his village and is told by his relieved mother that he has been gone a year, not the single night he experienced. He goes on to teach his village the dances taught to him by the killer whale people under the sea and becomes in time a chief and shaman of great power.
The killer whale’s spiritual potency is symbolic of the power of blending human intelligence with the forces of nature. The orca’s spirit is revered by Northwest tribes because it is seen as a friend to all of mankind. But Max’inuxw is also a fearsome thing to behold, its awful vengeance only a swish of its flukes and a flash of its toothy jaws away. Max’inuxw is not Shamu.
• • •
In ancient times, the Kwakwaka’wakw say, men and killer whales could talk to each other. Unfortunately, they were also at war. The myths do not say why, but for many years, orcas and men hunted and killed each other. One of the dances performed at the lodges tells the story of how the depredations of the orcas became so great that the people prayed to the spirit of the mighty Thunderbird to save them. In the dance, the Thunderbird and the Max’inuxw do fierce battle until finally the Thunderbird strikes a mighty blow, and the Killer Whale lies dead.
As the storytellers say, it was a time of pain and fear for both men and whales, but it did come to an end. It seems a boy from the Ma’amtagila tribe, whose territory included the land we now call Robson Bight, somehow befriended the killer whales there. So he decided the killing and fear had to cease. He began telling this to killer whales he would meet. One day he was out hunting, and the chief of the killer whales came to him. “Let us talk. Our losses are becoming great. We are concerned,” he said.
The boy replied, “We too are suffering. We are concerned, too.”
The Max’inuxw chief told him, “You must speak with your people. Tell them we must end this heartache. Tell them we must no longer hurt each other.”
The boy promised he would do as the chief asked. “I want us to be friends,” he said.
So the boy returned to his village at Itsikan and went before his chiefs at the great assembly. They heard him tell of the agreement proposed by the Max’inuxw. They huddled among themselves, and then called the boy before them.
“You must return to the Max’inuxw with word that we have agreed to this. And we will agree to it for all time. Take it back to the whales and tell them.”
So the boy did as the chiefs asked. The first peace treaty between killer whales and man was made, and ever since that time, men and the orcas have lived together without killing each other. The Max’inuxw bring salmon to the tribes, and the tribes honor their ancestors, the Max’inuxw.
“Today, the Kwakwaka’kwa still honor this treaty,” their storytellers say. “There are many stories of how Max’inuxw, the killer whale, has helped us. They have saved people from drowning; they have shown us where to find food in times of famine; and we know the whales to be our ancestors’ spirits. And we have lived in harmony with Max’inuxw ever since the boy befriended them.”
• • •
There are still people who claim to be able to speak with killer whales—psychically, that is. One of these lives in the San Juan Islands and has written a book about the subject, describing telepathic conversations she has had, from the comfort of an apartment in San Francisco, with Granny, the matriarch of the Southern Residents’ J pod. Oddly enough, Granny’s psychic descriptions of life in the pod happened to coincide almost perfectly with scientists’ previous descriptions of the daily life of killer whales, with a few juicy tidbits thrown in for good measure. Whale scientist Ken Balcomb says the believers in psychic contact call him up at his Center for Whale Research from time to time. “I’ve had people calling me up from Montreal, saying, ‘I’ve just had this feeling about Granny, and they just sent me this telepathic message,’ and I was supposed to go out and check on them right away,” he recalls with a chuckle. His answer: “Um, did she tell you where she was? Because it’s January, and I have no idea.”
Attributing mystical values to cetaceans, and particularly to dolphins, has become a cottage industry around the globe, running the gamut from 3-D oil paintings and kitschy sculpture to abusive “swim with the dolphins” programs that purport to have the ability to heal the sick. Along the way, the public has adopted a number of myths about dolphins that either aren’t true or are distortions of things we simply don’t know with any certainty. It is almost an article of faith, for example, that dolphins have kind and cooperative dispositions, are models of non-aggressive behavior, and have a special attachment to humans, none of which is true at all.
The most appalling permutation of this mentality has been the proliferation of a variety of facilities that offer the opportunity for people to experience what it’s like to be in the water with a dolphin and that often claim all kinds of marvelous medical value from what’s called “dolphin assisted therapy” (DAT). The mortality rate of dolphins in these businesses is appallingly high, and it’s not surprising that many people discover that, once in the water with a dolphin, the dolphin rarely actually wants to be in the water with them. A number of people have been bitten and bashed by their cetacean “friends” in these facilities.
It’s all fakery. As dolphin scientist and ethicist Lori Marino observes, “The worst of it, perhaps, is that there is absolutely no evidence for DAT’s therapeutic effectiveness. At best, there might be short-term gains attributable to the feel-good effects of being in a novel environment and the placebo boost of having positive ex
pectations. Nothing more. Any apparent improvement in children with autism, people with depression, and others is as much an illusion as the ‘smile’ of the dolphin.” Marino disparages these programs as “a whole bucket of wrong.”
As the largest dolphin, orcas have been subject to similar mythologizing and mystical deification. A fair amount of it is fuzzy-minded silliness bordering on pure charlatanism, such as the psychics and their “revelations” about orca life. Some of this is embodied in the fuzzy, kid-friendly image of orcas peddled at marine parks around the globe, all of which erases the whale’s essence as both a predator and a social animal.
However, nearly everyone who is around orcas for much time at all—either in the wild or in captivity—will attest that they have an uncanny knack for the seemingly coincidental; they do things, or show up at times, that suggest that the animals are somehow reading people’s minds and messing with them, like the big male orca I paddled with in Johnstone Strait, who mere moments after I had mused to myself about how undemonstrative the Northern Residents appeared to be, breached only twenty yards away from me, as if to say: “I’ll show you demonstrative!”
One of the better known examples of this phenomenon occurred in late October 2013. A Washington state ferry transporting a precious collection of Native American artifacts was forced to stop when it was surrounded by a pod of cavorting orcas. The Bainbridge Island ferry runs every half hour or so, and the orcas that day happened to pick the one boat that was transporting rare tribal artifacts from Seattle’s Burke Museum, where they had been kept for decades, back to the western side of Puget Sound, where they had originated, to be housed in a brand new museum built by the Suquamish tribe, Chief Seattle’s ancestral nation. The tribal chairman, Leonard Forsman, noted that his tribe’s myths also celebrated the killer whale and viewed them as ancestors.
Of Orcas and Men Page 2