Of Orcas and Men

  It also has the virtue of being a spectacularly, laughably bad movie, with all the requisite components: slumming work from great actors (Harris and Charlotte Rampling), early work by a future starlet (this was the only film Derek had made prior to her short-lived star turn as the “it girl” object of Dudley Moore’s obsession in 1979’s 10), a pretentious script. Everything in Orca is bad: bad writing, bad science, bad acting by everyone involved, and spectacularly bad special effects. Most shots of live killer whales were clearly taken of captive orcas inside a concrete tank; you can see the flopped-over fin, typical for captives, on the male—actually Nepo, a big male captured in Pender Harbor in 1969—in footage taken at the old Marine World park in Los Angeles, while the shots of the rampaging killer whale of the title circling the boat all show a normal straight fin with a bloody notch where Harris’ harpoon wounded him. Of course, that circling fin was quite obviously fake as well.

  There’s the bad science, all of which has been superseded since 1977 by actual research into killer whales and their familial structures. “You know, killer whales are monogamous,” warns Bo Derek, fearful that Harris’s attempts to snare a killer whale might “break up a family.” Perhaps this is why the angered male orca later bites off one of her legs. Really, it tells you everything you need to know about the film’s relationship to scientific reality that, when the titular orca sees its mate and unborn child being killed, it raises its head about the water and roars, loudly, deeply, like a lion, with rage.

  “Like humans, orcas have a profound instinct for vengeance,” relates Rampling, who plays the film’s resident killer-whale researcher. (She also plays recordings of humpback songs to explain to her students how orcas communicate.) This evidently explains why, after seeing its family slain by Harris, the orca proceeds to blow up much of the local town (it manages to rupture a fuel line and set it afire, which spreads to a refinery) and then tears down the shoreside building housing Ms. Derek, who slides with the wreckage into the water and loses her leg to the voracious orca, courtesy of the aforementioned special-effects realism. (I think Derek’s missing leg turned up a few years later as the lamp in A Christmas Story.)

  The film trundles on to a weird climax aboard Harris’s boat in the Arctic waste (actually filmed in the warm waters of Malta) during which Will Sampson, desperately looking for something to do after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, gets crushed by fake falling ice that sinks their boat. Then Richard Harris confronts his tormentor on a fake ice floe, slips into the drink, and is flipped fatally out of the water by the orca’s powerful flukes back onto the ice, whence his body then slides down back into the water and sinks.

  That’s right. Unlike Jaws, this movie features a creature who wins and is still alive at the end. No doubt Dino de Laurentis noticed that killing off the shark at the end of Jaws made a sequel much trickier, so he dispensed with that problem here, and if Orca had not bombed, no doubt there would have been a sequel. Reportedly, de Laurentis toyed with the idea of having the monster gorilla he created for his 1976 remake of King Kong face off against the orca in a 1980s movie-monster sequel—sort of like Godzilla vs. Megalon, without the wrestling moves—but couldn’t get anyone to bite.

  Convenience aside, the film’s outcome is striking in its rarity. Having the monster win was unheard of in these man-vs.-beast epics. Even more striking was that it was the most satisfying outcome, given that Hollywood is built on revenge melodramas such as this, but with humans usually getting the revenge for harm inflicted by the titular animals. In this movie, that’s all turned on its head; the audience is far more inclined to sympathize with the orca, horribly wronged by the Harris character, who despite displaying some pangs of conscience nonetheless is a blithering idiot from start to finish and a despicable brute in the early goings.

  In this regard, it was one of the first films to portray an animal as not merely intelligent but also as a moral actor, which reflected, similarly, the public’s shifting perceptions of killer whales generally. This would culminate, a few years later, in the movie Free Willy, the public campaign to “rescue” the whale made famous in that film, and the growing agitation to release captive killer whales back into wild waters.

  It must be said, however, that movies had only a secondary role in the initial transformation of public attitudes about killer whales; if anything, they only reflected changes that came bubbling up along with the rise of an environmental ethos, especially in the West, embodied in the various “Save the Whales” campaigns that arose in the late 1960s and ’70s.

  Make no mistake: The sea change in public perceptions about killer whales that occurred then was primarily a product of aquariums and marine parks that put captive orcas on display. Killer whales ceased being demonic bringers of death, all teeth and vengeance, and almost magically became transformed instead into cuddly watergoing pandas, friendly to humans, endlessly docile, and pretty darned smart, too. It wasn’t quite as false as the old narrative—but it came close.

  • • •

  Ted Griffin and Don Goldsberry kept taking killer whales out of Puget Sound waters, and a number of other captors operated similarly in the Vancouver Island area, up until the mid-1970s. By then, everybody had gotten a good look at how they went about their business. It wasn’t pretty. In addition to setting purse seine nets to snag the whales, Goldsberry and Co. took to the skies to herd the whales into those nets, dropping seal bombs, small explosive devices, from the planes to frighten the orcas into their well-laid traps. It may have been brutal, but it worked. Of course, the brutality of it all meant that inevitably there were some collateral losses, as the orca cowboys might have put it. A lot of whales were dying in the process.

  One of the worst of these occurred in August 1970, when Griffin and Goldsberry and crew drove a large pod of whales into a large bay on the eastern side of Whidbey Island called Penn Cove, renowned for its mussels and clams, within view of most of the residents of Coupeville, one of the largest towns on the island. It also occurred within earshot, and the noise was terrible; to this day, people who witnessed the roundup talk about how the whales “screamed” when they came up and spyhopped. A large group of other whales gathered outside the net and exchanged whistles and calls with those inside.

  In the process of collecting seven whales for distribution to marine parks around the world, the crew also managed to kill four orcas, three calves and an adult, who drowned in their nets. Ted Griffin ordered workers to surreptitiously slit the whales’ bellies, weigh them down with chains and tires, and sink them. Unfortunately for Griffin, several months later, the whales’ corpses were caught in a fisherman’s net and pulled up onto shore, where news photographers recorded the event, and considerable outrage grew about the tactics being used to capture these whales.

  Because they were such a common sight for people who plied the waters of Puget Sound, the assumption was that there were thousands of these whales and that removing a few for captive display wouldn’t harm the population, but then scientists began studying them more carefully and discovered that it was closer to a hundred whales all told—if that many.

  The study techniques were pioneered by the Canadian marine biologist, Michael Bigg, who figured out that the white “saddle patches” behind a killer whale’s dorsal fin are unique to each animal, like a fingerprint. Moreover, the dorsal fins were often distinctive in themselves (particularly those of males and those that had nicks in them) and could offer quick identification of individual whales. By photographing them, Bigg and his fellow scientists were able to compile an accurate census of the killer whale populations in the Pacific Northwest. By the mid-1970s, the shocking news was confirmed: There were fewer than a hundred whales in the population of orcas that lived in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, and there were about two hundred whales who lived in the area of northern Vancouver Island and the archipelago of fjords and islands around it.

  The issue came to a head in March 1976, just as the Washington Legislature began debating w
hether to call a halt to any further captures of killer whales from their waters. It happened that Don Goldsberry and his crew, now working for SeaWorld, drove a pod of whales into the harbor in Olympia, in view of the capitol dome where the matter was being discussed, as well as within a stone’s throw of the college campus where a conference of whale researchers was getting under way.

  Goldsberry was using his usual techniques to harass the whales, dropping seal bombs, and buzzing the whales with airplanes. It was obvious to everyone watching that the roundup was in violation of his permit under the recently passed Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which required collectors to be “humane.” Washington state officials, including Secretary of State Ralph Munro and Attorney General Slade Gorton, took SeaWorld to court and shut down their operations in Washington State permanently. The legislature, meanwhile, declared Puget Sound to be a sanctuary for the whales. Canada did likewise for its waters, shutting down orca captures in the Northwest for good.

  The whales of Puget Sound do not often return to the places where they were captured. With rare exceptions, you will no longer see killer whales, as you once did, in Penn Cove, Carr Inlet, Port Madison, Yukon Harbor, or any of the places where humans drove them into nets and captured them. They still visit many diverse places in the Puget Sound’s waters, are still seen from time to time chugging right past Seattle itself, but they do not go to those other places anymore. They seem to remember.

  • • •

  Every one of the fifty Southern Resident whales captured by Ted Griffin and Don Goldsberry from the Puget Sound is now dead, with one exception. Lolita, one of the young calves taken at Penn Cove in 1970, remains alive 44 years later at the Miami Seaquarium. Griffin lost the stomach for orca captures after the Penn Cove debacle and dropped out after 1972. Griffin said he could see the writing on the wall, probably in the form of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which was passed that year and which placed tough conditions on capturing the creatures.

  Goldsberry packed up his operations and went north, far north, to Iceland, where he and his colleagues knew there was another orca population ripe for the plucking, especially since Icelandic fishermen had always seen orcas as competitors for herring. Working for SeaWorld, they went to work and removed some 48 whales from the orca population around Iceland, between 1976 and 1988, and they had plenty of customers.

  The orca-display industry blossomed in the 1970s and ‘80s, especially as aquarium owners realized they could draw large crowds with the big mammals. They sprouted in places like Ontario, Hong Kong, San Antonio, Munich, and the Netherlands. Some of these were former dolphinariums, such as Miami Seaquarium and Reino Aventura in Mexico City, which simply expanded their pools to accommodate killer whales, meaning that the whales were in smallish facilities. Others, such as Sealand in Victoria, British Columbia, were just glorified sea pens constructed mostly to draw in tourists, cashing in quick bucks on the new animal sensation.

  The king of the hill was (and still is) SeaWorld, which not only had the largest orca displays in the world in both San Diego and Orlando, but also began consolidating the industry in the 1980s under its corporate banner. Over the years, SeaWorld’s ownership has changed several times. The publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought it in 1976, then sold it to beer-maker Anheuser Busch in 1989; most recently, it became a subsidiary of the Blackstone Group. However, in all those years, SeaWorld has been actively acquisitive, sometimes buying facilities just to take possession of their killer whales and other animals and to ship them to their own tanks, then closing down the aging parks, as they did when they bought Marineland of the Pacific in 1987.

  All this was possible because millions of people began filing through the turnstiles at these parks and still do. The marine-park industry attracts more paying customers than even the most popular sports leagues. In 2012, orca facilities around the world drew over 120 million people, more than the combined attendance at Major League Baseball, National Football League, and National Basketball Association games. Orcas are Big Money now.

  The public’s fascination with orcas was remarkable, considering that less than a generation before, these creatures had mostly elicited shudders of fear. Now the image has shifted almost completely in the opposite direction, to that of giant, friendly oceangoing pandas, big dolphins who are very smart, too. It was true in a way, but a fantasy at the same time.

  Nonetheless, it was a brilliant piece of marketing. In addition to tickets, it sold millions of plush orca dolls and orca T-shirts. There is little doubt that, by letting people see for themselves their gentle natures, their playfulness, and their intelligence, the captive-orca industry played an overwhelming role in not only shifting public attitudes about killer whales but also of entrancing millions of young people with the sense of awe that orcas naturally elicit. The industry has been enduringly influential; many younger marine scientists today, who were not born when Flipper was on the air, credit visits to SeaWorld or similar marine parks with inspiring them to pursue careers in biology.

  Along the way, the facilities for the orcas have improved significantly; they now have much more room at most parks than in the early years, and their handlers have largely figured out their medical and dental routines. The displays of the whales, meanwhile, have become increasingly oriented toward entertainment with loud music, fantastic leaps and acrobatics, and amusing displays of cleverness. SeaWorld’s shows in particular, until very recently, featured jaw-dropping interactions between the trainers and the whales, who would pick up their little humans with their flippers and their rostrums and go flying through the air with them.

  The remarkable part of all this, especially for the trainers and the people working with the orcas, was not only the creatures’ docility and friendliness, but also their intelligence. Indeed, the more people worked with them up close, the more that some of them began to wonder just how appropriate it was to keep them captive. The more they taught them cute animal tricks and tried to make the killer whales behave, the more they wondered just who was really in control. However, that was knowledge only for those who worked behind the scenes, and not many of them remained there if they ever expressed doubts publicly.

  • • •

  The first effort to return a captive whale to the wild was originally supposed to happen in October of 1982. Haida, a big male J pod orca who had been captured in 1968 by Ted Griffin and his outfit with four other orcas (including Skana), had been purchased by Sealand of the Pacific and had been residing in Sealand’s open-water aquarium on the shores of east Victoria for 14 years.

  There were many dubious and disreputable outfits involved in orca captivity in the early years, and Sealand was one of them. Despite offering its whales the advantage of fresh seawater, Sealand was a hellish prison for its whales. Once the park was closed for the day, its managers did not give its orcas free roam of its smallish enclosures. Instead, each whale was locked away in an individual “holding module” that was only 25 feet by 30 in size and only 12 feet deep. This meant that for the next 12 hours or so, the whales were required to remain motionless in one place, mostly in darkness, even though these are animals, as we have seen, who do not fall asleep, at least not as we do.

  They had tried to mate Haida with a number of females. First came the transient whales they had captured in 1970 near Victoria, the albino, Chimo, and her sister, Nootka. Only Chimo remained in the facility with Haida (Nootka was shipped off to a variety of other aquariums before she died, 20 years later, at Sea World in San Diego), but although she was observed mating with Haida, they never produced offspring before Chimo died two years later. Two more females, dubbed Nootka 2 (a K pod female) and Nootka 3 (a transient), were captured from Northwest waters with an eye toward mating with Haida, but each of those whales died within nine months of capture. Haida’s last mate, a rescued orca named Miracle, who in 1977 had been found shot and ill as a young calf and returned to health at Sealand, drowned in January 1982, tangled in the nets that made up Sealand�
�s dubious enclosures, before ever reaching sexual maturity.

  After that, Sealand decided it was time to capture more whales. However, the legal and political scene had altered radically, with the system much more carefully regulated since the last time Sealand had overseen orca captures. Organized protests against their efforts to seek a permit to capture more whales resulted in an unusual agreement with the Canadian government: Sealand could capture two more whales if it first released Haida back to the wild.

  The release was scheduled to occur in mid-October of 1982. However, on the first day of the month, Haida fell ill with a lung infection, and he died three days later. (A necropsy showed no signs of foul play.) So much for the release of a long-captive orca, as well as for Sealand’s hopes to capture more Northwest whales.

  Instead, they turned to Don Goldsberry’s SeaWorld operations in Iceland and purchased from them three whales captured in 1982, two females, named Nootka 4 and Haida 2, and a young male, named Tilikum.

  Even though they had all been captured together, the three whales did not have a good dynamic together, at least not with Tilikum, who was chased around the pool and bullied by the two females, leaving him with rake marks all over his body. He frequently had to be separated from the other two because he was small at the time (ironic, considering his later immense size as an adult) and was not inclined to return the aggression.

  His trainer, a young Canadian named Colin Baird, said Tilikum was a pleasure to train. Tilikum—or “Tili,” as he was known—was popular and “very easy to work with,” Baird recalled. “He was very easygoing, he learned quickly, he learned well, very responsive,” he said. “You know, he was probably my favorite of the three.”

  However, Baird said the tense social dynamic among the three orcas made all of them moody. “They have personalities, for the lack of a better word, individual personalities, and they have good days and bad days just as we do,” he said. “There were some days, Tilikum would have a certain look in his eye—then I would just say, ‘Nope, not getting in the water with him today.’”