So when the Hollywood filmmakers approached the park’s owners about their project, any scruples about the script probably vanished with the opportunity to at least make a large chunk of money from Keiko before he died and, at best, to possibly get him into a better situation and forestall that outcome. None of them were quite prepared for the film’s overwhelming success.
What really set Free Willy apart from the stock boy-and-his-critter story was the animal: Keiko was a surprisingly charismatic animal actor, chosen partly because of his reputation for being easy to work with. Keiko was more than a Flicka or Lassie; the film’s director captured accurately the orca’s affinity for humans, the affectionate and clever sides of his personality. When, in the course of the plot, Willy saves the boy’s life by lifting him unconscious from the bottom of the pool, the scene has an element of credibility lacking from similar scenes in other films. It’s easy to believe an orca would be intelligent, caring, and capable enough to make the rescue. Nor was this by accident: A few years before, Keiko had in real life rescued an 18-month-old boy, the son of Reino Aventura’s groundskeeper, in nearly the same fashion shown in the movie. The screenwriters heard about the incident and wrote it into the film; Keiko easily recreated the rescue on the first take, which is what you see in the movie.
Audiences may have been suckered by the movie’s sappily heartwarming storyline (yes, Jesse does finally bond with his foster family), but the real attraction was the charismatic orca; like the boy in the movie, viewers, especially younger ones, felt connected to the big, smiling creature. That bond manifested itself when, later that year, magazine and newspaper stories examined Keiko’s real-life situation at Reino Aventura. A public outcry arose when a number of articles and TV news reports made it known that Keiko’s tiny pool could not even filter out the wastes the whale produced daily; that he suffered from skin lesions worsened by the little pool and the polluted Mexico City air; and that fear of contaminating other orcas with the virus causing the lesions was keeping Keiko from being placed in a healthier situation.
At first, it appeared that a team of scientists, led by Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research, would successfully organize a plan to rehabilitate Keiko in an open sea pen in his Icelandic home waters. His owners at Reino Aventura even signed an agreement with Balcomb to do so. Behaving like the villainous owner in the movie, however, the big money behind the captive-orca industry quickly intervened to keep Keiko where he was. Far from eager to see any captive orca ever go free, the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks, a coalition of marine-park owners dominated by SeaWorld, applied pressure on Reino’s owners. Two days after the agreement with Balcomb was announced, it was scuttled when the Alliance announced it would oversee Keiko’s care and return him to the wild. A few months later, the Alliance admitted it had no such plan in place, but their intervention was enough to end Balcomb’s involvement, as intended.
Keiko remained in limbo until early 1994, when the Earth Island Institute, famous for its campaigns to stop fishing practices that killed dolphins, was named to lead the campaign to help the whale. The Free Willy/Keiko Foundation, headed by Earth Island’s Dave Phillips, soon began a series of fund-raisers that would buy a new home for “Willy.” Around the world, children began sending in their lunch money and bake-sale dollars for the campaign. One school in Florida alone raised $30,000. In all, some $2 million for Keiko came from children. Their campaigns were often accompanied by children’s drawings of leaping, happy orcas.
There were also private discussions going on. Warner Brothers executives realized they would have a public-relations disaster on their hands if “Willy” were to die while in captivity in Mexico City. “Warner Brothers stepped in at this point, and said, ‘You know, we need to do something for this whale—we found him, we made him a star, we can’t just leave him there,’” recalled Naomi Rose of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), who had been involved in the original search and negotiations for the making of the film. This sparked the negotiations that brought about the agreement to move Keiko to a new facility that would be built in Newport. The remaining $6 million needed to make it happen came from donors like Warner Brothers, the Humane Society, and Craig and Wendy McCaw of McCaw Cellular.
The campaign culminated with Keiko’s dramatic arrival in Newport. United Parcel Service donated its planes and crews to fly the big whale up by troop transport from Mexico City to Oregon. The Discovery Channel paid for exclusive rights to film the flight for a documentary about the orca. Viewers from around the world tuned in to watch that night’s media byte: “Willy” arriving at his new home.
• • •
Oregon’s winter weather is doing its best to train Keiko for a return to the wild. In the first month after his arrival, a fierce hailstorm hit town, then a cold snap iced up the coast for the first time in years, followed by a week of stinging, drenching rain. A pretty good imitation of Iceland, but Keiko is not exactly drinking it all in. He’s grown used to lounging in the Mexico City sun. His trainer of the last five years, Karla Corral, has watched him these weeks dealing with the weather: “He doesn’t like the wind or the rain very much, I think,” she says. “He’s ducking under a lot more.” Some of that behavior is Keiko’s newfound preference for staying underwater. It has now been two months since he arrived in Oregon. He explores his new artificial reef, sometimes rubbing his belly on it, and spends a lot of time in front of the viewing windows, looking back at the crowds, thick with children, that have flooded into Newport to get a look at the movie star.
“He hasn’t seen people from that vantage point before and was fascinated,” says Mike Glenn, the Oregon Coast Aquarium’s curator. “It must have seemed like wide-screen TV to him, with all the coming and going and excited conversations.”
Of course, staying underwater makes it easy for Keiko to dodge the weather—except when he eats. Karla Corral carries a bucket of fish and squid to the top side of Keiko’s pool, an angle the public never sees, and feeds him several times each day. On this day, the heavy rains hit a peak, blowing in on 30-mph winds, drenching anyone who steps outside for longer than a few minutes.
A Mexico native, Corral is not enamored of the Oregon winters, either. But she says she doesn’t mind as long as Keiko’s happy. She says the whale has been her best friend for the last five years, and she is glad for the chance to ease his transition to his new home. So the feeding this morning, in a whistling wind, is not exactly pleasant. At least not until Keiko’s smiling head comes popping out to greet Corral.
Keiko nuzzles his longtime trainer, Karla Corral.
“Hey, big guy,” she coos to him. He opens his mouth expectantly. She tosses in a handful of fish and squid. He chomps down and dives back underwater. She waits for him to return. Soon, they’re going through that day’s paces. She holds out a rod with a ball on the end; Keiko spyhops up and twirls in the water just below the ball. She holds out an arm; he swims on his side, his flipper waving hello, a familiar response to fans of Free Willy. In between, of course, there are frequent gulps of the handfuls of food Karla tosses in. They talk. She bends down and nuzzles him, nose to nose.
“I have to talk to him a lot,” says Corral. “I’ll sit down at this end and talk to him about things—if I’m feeling sad or nice, what I do in the days, I sit there and talk to him. I think he really understands, because he stays in, he says things to me. He makes these kind of weird faces. He just sits there and listens. That’s why he’s great.”
Keiko has the same effect on his audiences. The big orca’s personal warmth is his most distinguishing characteristic. He seems genuinely to like people, and people respond in kind.
Even as Keiko swam for the first time around his new pool, with its expensive ozone-filtered fresh seawater system and its immense space and artificial rubbing reef, pressure began building behind the scenes. If Keiko could go free, scientists and activists wondered, then why not others? They pointed to some prominent cases where orcas were being kept in condit
ions worse than Keiko’s at Reino Aventura, noting that some of these orcas present fewer logistical problems for release. Such questions, however, strike fear deep in the heart of the people who make millions from keeping orcas captive. They fear most of all that the first orca to be returned to the wild would turn the trickle into a flood. They knew that soon after Keiko, or any other whale, successfully went free, their customers would begin asking why Corky and Shamu at SeaWorld shouldn’t go likewise.
“Personally, I think the industry is absolutely terrified at the prospect of any captive orca going free,” observed John Hall, a marine biologist and orca expert who worked four years at SeaWorld before leaving in disgust.
Public pressure to free the animals likely would cripple, if not destroy, the captive-orca industry. Already, public displeasure has just about shut down the business of capturing orcas in the wild. The Icelandic captures ended in 1989; until very recently, the last recorded mass wild capture had been in 1997 in Japan, when five killer whales were netted in Japanese waters and packed off to Japanese marine parks. (All five of those whales are now dead.) In 2013, though, Russian fishermen captured eight killer whales from the Sea of Okhost; their fate remains unknown. Another wild whale named Morgan was rescued near the Netherlands in 2010 and is now in a marine park in Tenerife, Spain. Public outcry over the captures convinced marine parks to drop the practices, at least overtly. Their attention now is focused on captive breeding, at which orcas have only been somewhat successful. Orcas’ birth rate in captivity has been well under 50 percent: 14 of 39 pregnancies have produced calves who survived the first year. (The infant mortality of wild orcas is unknown, but probably about as high.)
The captive breeding program is not without risks: Gudrun, one of SeaWorld’s Icelandic females (captured in 1976), died during childbirth in Orlando in 1996. In 2010, Gudrun’s captive-born daughter Taima, still at Sea World Orlando, also died during childbirth. Moreover, the gene pool of captive orcas is very limited and, according to one study, is already showing signs of heavy inbreeding. Finally, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the captive breeding program is the early age at which females are being impregnated, sometimes as young as four or five years. In the wild, females typically do not begin producing offspring until they reach the age of 12, at earliest.
Ending captures meant the world’s supply of captive orcas suddenly became very limited and very valuable. The idea of just setting them free in their home waters is laughable to the orcas’ owners, who are, after all, businessmen who are perfectly aware that just dolphins and fish will not pack in crowds eager to be dazzled. For that, they need orcas. Even as the captures ended, however, the ethics of keeping orcas in captivity have grown increasingly dubious, particularly as we learn more about their intelligence and their complex social and emotional lives. Then the question becomes: Why not return wild-born orcas to their native waters and pods?
This was the idea that the Keiko Project was bearing out, and it gained legitimacy with each day that he grew healthier and stronger and learned how to hunt fish again.
• • •
The whole idea of the Keiko Project was not just to give Keiko a happy ending, but to prove that it could be done. In the mind’s eye, the idea is almost as simple as the end of the movie: the whale, in a Herculean leap, simply jumps over a retaining wall and is free to return to his family. The realities of reintroduction are much more complex.
“Releasing animals back to the wild can work,” says marine biologist Greg Bossert of the University of Miami, who has studied both Keiko and Lolita and has long ties to both SeaWorld and the Miami Seaquarium. “It can work quite well, if you take certain criteria and do it within those channels. We’ve been releasing manatees since the 1970s, and we have a very high release rate when certain criteria are met. Those criteria include length of time under the care of man, whether or not there’s disease transmission potential, on and on and on.”
It was Bossert’s view at the time that neither Keiko nor Lolita were release candidates and that it would be unethical to consider them, and he continues to feel that way about Lolita. Keiko, he said, had three well-known strikes against him: his weak health, embodied in the papilloma virus that caused the skin lesions around his pectoral fins; a lack of hunting skills; and weak language and social skills, both crucial to survival in the wild. Lolita, he said, was too old and had been in captivity too long. At the same time, Bossert couldn’t name any captive orcas that he would consider viable candidates, either.
Indeed, even as Keiko was being lowered into that tank in Oregon, industry spokespeople were inveighing against the possibilities of wild release. They pointed to other problems, notably Keiko’s unnaturally worn teeth and the reluctance of officials in Iceland to accept him back. They warned that he might have trouble foraging in the depleted fish stocks of the Atlantic.
Some of their fears were transparently melodramatic and oddly un-self-aware. “The public has not been told that the result of this, the release, almost means certain death for this animal,” warned Marilee Keef of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks (AMMP). “They’ve made it sound like it’s something that can occur easily.” She refused to acknowledge, however, that Keiko’s continued captivity at Reino Aventura, something the Alliance refused to do anything about, was far more certain to cause his death.
Keiko quickly proved the doubters wrong about his ability to recover his health. Within the first two months, his food intake doubled, his weight rose dramatically, and he shed the skin lesions from the papilloma virus infection that everyone had noticed in Free Willy. Much of that was because he became more active in the much larger tank and thus burned more calories. He became much stronger and more muscular and soon was doing full breaches atop his tank, often without even needing his trainers to encourage him. He began taking an interest in, and then eating, live fish released in his tank.
He was a smash hit at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, drawing 1.3 million visitors in 1996, more than doubling its attendance from the previous year. Children and parents alike lined up to ooh and aah at the big whale through the big windows that looked into his tank from below, and Keiko was always visible when there were people present. He would hang in the water above them like a great glowing angel, contemplative and wise. At other times, he would come face to face with the youngest children who lined the windows and would seem to observe them as they observed him.
When the crowds left and he was alone at night, he would watch movies on a television his trainers set up for him at one of the windows. Mostly he liked videos of other orcas. His favorite movie—the only one he would watch from beginning to end—was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He was utterly uninterested in Free Willy.
Soon he became so strong and healthy that Keiko Project officials began making plans to take the next step: Moving to a sea pen in Iceland, where he could reacclimate to his cold home waters and learn how to hunt food on his own again. At least, that was the plan. As always with killer whales, profits beckoned temptingly.
Behind the scenes, officials at the Oregon Coast Aquarium had become addicted to the money stream created by Keiko’s immense popularity. Quietly, they began working against the orca’s release. Someone began padlocking access to the filters for Keiko pool, and soon they became clogged and nonfunctional. Soon enough, he began showing signs of skin infections caused by swimming in his own excrement. The aquarium leaked word that Keiko was sick, blaming the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation that was overseeing the project. When the foundation pointed out that the aquarium had functionally caused the illness, the aquarium in turn claimed that they had only locked up the filters because the foundation’s money had been drying up.
When PBS’s Frontline featured a report on the feud, Craig McCaw was blunt in his assessment: “It is not in the aquarium’s interest for Keiko to be free … there’s a lot of money at stake,” he told the reporter. “And we have felt that perhaps the aquarium was not doing everything it could to possibly bring
about the release of Keiko to its highest level.”
Aquarium director Phyllis Bell replied: “Well, it depends on how—if Keiko’s ready to be released or not. We always have supported their goal of releasing Keiko, if it was possible and it that was the best thing for Keiko…. So if the best thing is not releasing him, then he’s welcome to stay here.” Well, that was reassuring.
The aquarium’s machinations forced the foundation’s hand. Reasoning that Keiko was already healthy enough to thrive in an Icelandic sea pen, they began moving up the date for his departure, and as soon as the facility was finished, they made their move. On September 9, 1998, after two and a half years in Oregon, Keiko was loaded onto a C-17 transport and flown to the Icelandic village of Vestmannaeyjar on the island of Heimaey, where his large new sea pen awaited.
Phyllis Bell was so enraged over having been outmaneuvered that she reportedly swore she would never allow another killer whale into her facility and ensured just that by announcing a major construction project for a new facility that would essentially cut up Keiko’s gorgeous new tank into sections and create a set of separate displays. The original budget for the project was about $7 million; it ultimately cost about $11 million. Bell took out $2 million in loans to cover the costs without any authorization from her board and was forced to resign in 2002. She eventually served prison time for forgery in the deception. It was also discovered afterward that Bell had diverted $200,000 in gift-shop profits intended for Keiko to pay for her project. The aquarium defaulted on $14 million in revenue bonds and endured a panoply of other hardships caused by Bell’s serial malfeasance.
Of Orcas and Men Page 23