Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  One day, a trainer accidentally got in the water with Tili on one of these days. That is when the orca’s bad moods metastasized into a tragedy. The Sealand show of February 20, 1991, had been nothing out of the ordinary. Then, near the end, one of the trainers, a 20-year-old champion swimmer and student at the University of Victoria named Keltie Byrne, slipped and fell into the pool. This was something out of the ordinary for the whales, and as she tried to clamber back out, Tilikum promptly seized Byrne by the leg and dragged her back into the water. The three whales then took turns playing with the trainer like a rag doll. She screamed for help. Other trainers came to her rescue but couldn’t separate the whales from her. After a while, Keltie Byrne did not return to the surface. Two hours later, they were able to recover her body.

  It was the first time in recorded history that a human being had been attacked and killed by an orca. The story horrified people in the Northwest but did not travel much out of the region. A year later, Sealand of the Pacific shuttered its operations and sold all three of its killer whales to SeaWorld. Nootka and Haida went to San Diego. Tilikum was flown to Orlando, where in time he would grow to become the largest captive orca in the world—and the most notorious.

  • • •

  In 1999, after eight years at Sea World Orlando, Tilikum killed his second human.

  Somehow, a homeless 27-year-old man named Daniel Dukes managed to sneak inside the facility, buying a ticket and then hiding himself inside at closing time. Overnight, he went to Tilikum’s holding pool. No one is sure why, but he seems to have gotten into the pool voluntarily with Tili, perhaps so he could experience the magic of swimming with an orca. By then, the orca was not just fully grown, but at 12,000 pounds, he was the world’s largest captive killer whale. Tilikum’s trainers arrived the next morning to find him parading around the pool with Dukes’s naked corpse draped across his back. An autopsy found that Dukes had died of drowning. However, not only had Tilikum stripped him of his clothes, but the man’s body was covered in bite marks, contusions, and abrasions, and his genitals had been bitten off. John Jett, Tilikum’s longtime trainer, observed years later that no one really ever could figure out what happened, but “the guy definitely jumped in the wrong pool.”

  Officials at SeaWorld (which by now had shortened its name to a single word for corporate purposes, while still referring to individual parks with separate nouns) shrugged off the incident as a bizarre accident involving a person who violated all their safety procedures. However, eleven years later, Tilikum killed another of his trainers, and this time, there was no shrugging.

  It was a normal “Dine With Shamu” show, a program in which people pay large sums to sit at a poolside table and get an up-close look at the whales, at Orlando on February 24, 2010. The show featured Tilikum and one of SeaWorld’s top trainers, Dawn Brancheau, an athletic and attractive 40-year-old who had been an orca trainer for 16 years. During the show, there had been a minor misunderstanding between Brancheau and the orca, but no one noticed any tension or problem. At the show’s end, as everyone began to file out, Brancheau went to the shallow bench of the “slide out” on the pool’s edge and lay in the water, appearing to be conversing with Tilikum. Suddenly, she disappeared under water, yanked into the main pool by the orca. Dawn probably drowned about ten minutes into the assault; Tilikum refused to release his trophy and spent the next half hour battering her corpse further. In the end, when trainers forced him into the medical pool and raised its floor so that they could retrieve Brancheau’s body, he madly thrashed about with her body and finally bit off her whole left arm. No one realized this at first; they had to raise the floor a second time so that someone could retrieve it from his mouth.

  In the past, SeaWorld had managed to paper over what turned out, on closer examination, to be a long record of assaults on trainers by other killer whales, not just by Tilikum. Now it all came out. The federal government was the first to descend. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s California body, Cal/OSHA, had investigated Sea World’s San Diego facility after an incident in which the female orca Kasatka had seized another veteran trainer, a man named Ken Peters, and had toyed with him about the pool before finally releasing him. That 2007 report had presciently concluded, “If someone hasn’t been killed already, it is only a matter of time before it does happen.”

  Now OSHA’s main branch jumped in with both feet and held an investigation into SeaWorld. On August 23, 2010, it announced it was fining the park $75,000 for a variety of safety violations. More important, it ordered SeaWorld to immediately cease all “water work,” displays in which trainers swim and perform acrobatics with the orcas, because putting trainers in the water with orcas was inherently dangerous and not a controllable situation. The orcas, OSHA had decided, were actually in charge. SeaWorld bitterly assailed the ruling as “unfounded” and contested it in court. It lost its hearing before an administrative law judge and was fined $12,000 to boot.

  A few right-wing voices had chimed in on Brancheau’s death. Bryan Fischer, a preacher/pundit affiliated with the American Family Association, contended that Tilikum should have been put down permanently after he killed a trainer the first time and should be put down now, because the Bible commands you to kill any animal who harms a human: “Your animal kills somebody, your moral responsibility is to put that animal to death,” he wrote. He also noted that the same Scripture dictates a death by stoning for any animal (and its owner) that kills a second time, but later clarified that he didn’t think Tilikum should be stoned to death, just “euthanized, which can be done humanely.”

  That might have been a consideration with an animal of ordinary value, but Tilikum is worth several million dollars, and the thought of putting him down for killing a human never crossed the minds of his owners. Moreover, Tilikum’s value to SeaWorld extends well beyond the raw market; he is, in fact, the cornerstone of the company’s captive-breeding program.

  During the OSHA hearings, it emerged that Tilikum was the top producer of semen that was then used to impregnate female orcas throughout the SeaWorld breeding program. Indeed, it was revealed that he was the father or grandfather of more than half of SeaWorld’s captive-born killer whales. All of this was vividly documented for public consumption, first by David Kirby in his thorough accounting of the history of killer-whale captivity, Death at SeaWorld, and then, even more prominently and powerfully, by Gabriella Cowperthwaite’s stunning documentary on the Tilikum saga, Blackfish. The movie, released the summer of 2013, was a critical and box-office hit, and suddenly, the issue of orca captivity was at the forefront of the national discourse.

  SeaWorld had mostly played it low-key with Kirby’s book and not responded to its publication, but when Blackfish hit theaters, the company struck back. It first tried attacking the film by claiming that it was “a dishonest movie,” offering news media a list of eight points of rebuttal to the film’s content. However, these points, in reality, were all distortions or factually false themselves, including the assertion that we don’t really know how long orcas live in the wild.

  When CNN aired the documentary on its network for the better part of two weeks in October, 2013, SeaWorld refused to even allow any of its spokespersons on air for any of the multiple on-air discussions that ensued. Instead, they offered a boilerplate condemnation rich with self-congratulation, calling the film “inaccurate and misleading” and suggesting it was mainly intent on exploiting a tragedy. It added: “Perhaps most important, the film fails to mention SeaWorld’s commitment to the safety of its team members and guests and to the care and welfare of its animals, as demonstrated by the company’s continual refinement and improvement to its killer whale facilities, equipment and procedures both before and after the death of Dawn Brancheau.”

  During a panel discussion on Crossfire, designated conservative Newt Gingrich attempted to take SeaWorld’s side, but he had to acknowledge that he was “disappointed that SeaWorld isn’t representing itself,” adding, “I think,
as a multi-billion-dollar institution, they owe the country some level of transparency and some level of accountability. And I am disappointed that they’re not here tonight.”

  When you’re being lectured by Newt Gingrich, a renowned backroom dealer, about a lack of transparency, and everyone knows he is right, you should realize you’ve lost the game, but SeaWorld never did.

  Rather than back down, SeaWorld countered, in typically opaque corporate fashion, by creating a technologically flashy website titled “The Truth About SeaWorld,” featuring the testimony of numerous current SeaWorld trainers and veterinarians either describing the wonders of captive life for their orcas or the supposed falsity of the testimony of the various ex-SeaWorld trainers whose testimony in the interviews featured in Blackfish was so damning regarding the company’s treatment of orcas and its breeding program. The website claimed, for instance, that SeaWorld “does not separate mothers from their calves,” which is true only as long as one defines “calf,” as SeaWorld does, as a killer whale that is one year old or younger. Once they are over a year old, the company in fact transfers killer whales from facility to facility and separates mothers from their offspring in a manner that is completely unnatural, with relative ease and no apparent pangs of conscience whatsoever.

  Most notably, the “Truth” website attacked Blackfish for supposedly blaming Dawn Brancheau for her own death, based largely on the ruminations of the various ex-trainers over the sequence of events leading up to Tilikum’s attack. This was kind of an odd accusation, since the film not only documents two instances of SeaWorld spokesmen publically (and officially, before the OSHA hearing) saying Brancheau was at fault for her supposed mistakes but also shows the ex-trainers’ outrage over these attempts to blame the victim.

  However, shortly after the SeaWorld website went live, the CEO of Blackstone, the holding company that owns SeaWorld and took its stock public in 2013, went on national TV and blamed Brancheau again. Stephen Schwarzman, in a January 23, 2014 interview on CNBC, claimed that SeaWorld “had one safety lapse—interestingly, with a situation where the person involved violated all the safety rules that we had.”

  The next day, a PR firm hired by Blackstone corrected their boss in a subdued fashion, issuing a press release saying that Schwarzman “misspoke on the details of the death of SeaWorld killer whale trainer Dawn Brancheau. … Mr. Schwarzman was unaware of the precise circumstances of the incident, which occurred nearly four years ago, and his comments did not accurately reflect the facts of the accident or SeaWorld’s longstanding position on it. Dawn’s death remains a source of great sadness for her family, friends and colleagues and Blackstone regrets the error.”

  However, they added that Schwarzman had no plans to return to CNBC to correct the record on air.

  CHAPTER Six

  The Guardians

  IN 1967, ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGIST PAUL SPONG HAD BEEN HIRED TO HELP care for Skana, a Southern Resident female orca who had been captured by Ted Griffin and crew near Yukon Harbor. A brash younger version of the respected scientist he would become, he made the mistake of speaking up.

  Skana, whose name was the Haida word for killer whale, had quite the sketchy history. Captured as a calf, she had been sold to a boat show that put her on display in a large plastic tank and fed her hamburger and dead fish, which she refused to eat, so they then force-fed her. Her health failing, the owner of the Vancouver Aquarium had stepped in and taken Skana off their hands for $25,000, put her in a proper tank, and restored her health.

  Paul Spong checking his monitors’ gear at the OrcaLab overlook on West Cracroft Island.

  At the time, Spong, a native of New Zealand, was an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and the aquarium hired him to provide care and advise them on how to handle Skana, as well as another calf, a male named Hyak they acquired shortly thereafter. For two years, Spong did so, all the while recording the sounds they made and conducting his own behavioral experiments with them.

  Skana was spunky. After spending a couple of weeks being fed fish for hitting the right response button on one of Spong’s tests at a 90 percent rate, she suddenly and defiantly stopped and began intentionally hitting the wrong response button. “She was, in effect, telling me, ‘Hey, I’ve got ideas and opinions, too, buddy. Don’t think you can make me do whatever you want to do just because it means I’ll get a dead fish,’” Spong recalls. Believing she was bored, he started introducing sounds into her environment and found that she responded best to music. However, she was easily bored and remained defiant.

  Hyak, on the other hand, proved to be a real music aficionado. Spong found that he would perform water ballets to some classical music and breach and frolic to the Rolling Stones. He never seemed to want to listen to the same piece twice, sulking if the music was a repeat performance. Eventually, Spong found that he responded best to live music, particularly flutes, violins, and acoustic guitars: “He’d sit there so the point of his head was just millimeters away from the strings of the guitar. He’d be listening as if he were in ecstasy,” Spong later recalled.

  After a while, it became clear to Spong that captivity may be a great way for humans to get up close and learn about them, but it was bad for the whales themselves. So in 1969, Spong gave a speech at UBC, which was well attended and covered by the local papers, about what he had learned about orcas. “My respect for this animal has sometimes verged on awe,” he told the audience. “Orcinus orca is an incredibly powerful and capable creature, exquisitely self-controlled and aware of the world around it, a being possessed of a zest for life and a healthy sense of humor.”

  Spong was well aware he would be accused of anthropomorphizing these animals, but was determined to relate what was his considered scientific view. So he continued with the next logical step, voicing his skepticism about the ethics of keeping orcas in captivity and ended that phase of his career in the process: “It has been my feeling, since observing the semicaptive whales at Pender Harbour, that Orcinus orca in the wild, in the company of family, is a decidedly different creature than the Orcinus orca we observe in the aquarium,” he said, and he went on to suggest that aquariums look at providing their orcas with more of a semi-captive environment that might let them come and go at will.

  The headlines the next day told the public that Spong thought Skana would prefer her freedom, and within a few weeks, he was no longer employed by the Vancouver Aquarium. (Skana eventually died of an infection in captivity in 1980; a wild Southern Resident male, L78, born in 1989, was given the same name.) He also left UBC—and academia—and took a $4,000 grant to study killer whales in the wild and moved with his family up to Johnstone Strait in late 1969. Spong set up a foundation he called the Killer Whale (Orcinus Orca) Foundation, or KWOOF, with the purpose to stop any further captures of live whales from Northwest waters. He also set up a shack on a bay overlooking Blackney Passage and began working with a handful of other researchers in the area, cataloguing the activities and, he hoped, the identities of the orcas who populated these waters.

  This was the beginning of the first real human effort to act as guardians for killer whales, and it involved the scientific community that began the long and often difficult work of gathering data on these creatures. That core, once begun, has never ceased its work and is at the heart of what we now know about orcas.

  • • •

  Two years after erecting a shack covered with blue tarps, Spong bought the property it was on and built a full-sized laboratory and home there on the eastern point of Hanson Island, tucked into a little cove that offered decent protection from the weather and a terrific, open view of Blackney Passage, where the fins of the blackfish could often be seen frolicking in the churning tidal currents. He called it OrcaLab.

  Spong continued his experiments with music here and was perhaps a little dismayed to discover that wild orcas were, generally speaking, much less interested in his sound offerings, at least the recorded ones. So Spong decided to see if they l
iked live music better, and one summer, he brought in a live rock band to play from his boat. The response was much better, at least initially. The whales followed them at length, but no one was sure whether it was just the noise and novelty of it all that attracted them. At least everyone had a groovy time.

  Spong also conducted experiments by playing his flute around the orcas from his kayak. It produced mixed results, but it made people wonder if Spong was a serious scientist. Indeed, OrcaLab became legendary as a fun place to hang out among the hippie folk and eco-activists who came to Johnstone Strait in the summers to see the whales.

  All this was taking place in a time of great social ferment and shifting attitudes, coming on the heels of the Vietnam War and the rise of the environmental movement, one of the faces of which was a fresh appreciation for whales and dolphins and an increasingly critical view of the business of whaling and its effects on the world’s wildlife populations. By the 1960s, scientists were warning loudly that the world’s great whales were becoming endangered species, and this caught the public’s attention, especially through conservation-oriented organizations such as the National Geographic and Audubon societies, as well as TV wildlife programs such as those produced by famed diver Jacques Cousteau. Pretty soon, “Save the Whales” stickers were popping up on the bumpers of cars driven by the environmentally minded.

  On top of that, John Lilly and his vivid speculations about dolphin intelligence were gaining media attention, and dolphins and other cetaceans quickly became objects of fascination for the mysticism-minded. Even more stunning to public sensibilities were Roger Payne’s recordings of humpback whales singing in an awe-inspiring chorus, which demonstrated viscerally to ordinary people that these were creatures with a special kind of intelligence. The recordings even made a best-selling LP that, of course, was a special favorite of the hippie set.