Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  Paul Spong was jubilant. “There can now be no question about the success of the return project as it is clear that Springer has resumed living a normal social life among her kin and community,” he told reporters.

  Springer has not only been sighted with these whales every year since, but she has grown up to become a mother herself. In the spring of 2013, Graeme Ellis and John Ford spotted her with her own infant calf, frolicking in the waters near Bella Bella, British Columbia, far north of Vancouver Island.

  “I think this clearly is another sign that such rehabilitation is possible,” Ford observed.

  Graeme Ellis was especially gratified to see Springer’s baby: “It was just a relief for me after all these years since her reintroduction,” he said. “It’s the ultimate success, I think.”

  • • •

  No matter how you felt about captivity, it was always an awe-inspiring sight to see Finna and Bjossa breaching simultaneously out of the water. It made the whole crowd gasp; two giant sea creatures, rising 20 feet together into the air, twisting in unison, and splashing down gracefully a few feet apart.

  Finna and Bjossa, breaching for the crowd at Vancouver Aquarium in 1994.

  In the years before the Vancouver Aquarium got out of the business of displaying captive orcas, it was a sight you could always pay to go see. If it was a typically chilly and drizzly day at the Vancouver Aquarium, nestled in Stanley Park at the heart of the British Columbia metropolis, most people held umbrellas, trying to stay dry as they watched the display at the aquarium’s outdoor orca pool.

  Not all of them, however. A large knot of children would stay up close to the pool’s edge, in the “splash zone.” When the two whales finished their big breach, the giant wave that crashed up over the pool’s edge drenched the kids, who would then squeal in delight. It was like being anointed.

  In the flesh, orcas are so much more impressive than even the best wildlife film. Their mere physical presence, a combination of mass and grace, surprises even jaundiced adults, and if you make eye contact, those deep, black, wise-looking orbs can feel like they’re probing your soul. It’s downright unnerving.

  “I call killer whales, and big cetaceans in general, the light-switch,” says John Nightingale, Vancouver Aquarium’s executive director. “I’ve never seen another animal, maybe short of a giant panda, reaching out and getting ahold of people’s core of their brain, for just a moment. What you do with it, then, once you’ve got ahold of it, is up to the institution, and that’s the real struggle.”

  At Vancouver, the switch often turned on an interest in nature. After watching Finna and Bjossa, kids could tour the aquarium’s reef displays, or walk through its simulated rain forest, or watch a beluga-whale mother nursing her newborn. Along the way, they learned about ecosystems and about how human activity threatens these creatures. It’s an important, up-close education. Nightingale has always insisted that the aquarium’s board be dedicated to education as the best way to promote conservation. Nearly everything at the aquarium backs that up. Every child who visits leaves with a better understanding of the importance of protecting the world’s natural balance. The light, more than likely, has been turned on, at least for a while. That alone, Nightingale argues, was reason enough to have captive orcas. “As ambassadors of their kind, they continue to teach new generations to be interested and to care,” he says.

  However, responding to public pressure, the Aquarium announced in 1996 that it was adopting a policy precluding any further captures of wild orcas. When Finna died of pneumonia in 1997, leaving Bjossa with no companionship besides dolphins, the Aquarium decided to trade Bjossa rather than try to bring in another whale. She was traded to Sea World in San Diego, where she died four months later.

  Nightingale continues to defend keeping orcas captive: “Zoos and aquariums provide access and a vital connection to the world of wildlife and our environment, helping to foster an understanding of nature and how it works, and an appreciation for why it matters,” he explained in a CNN op-ed titled “The Case for Captive Animals.”

  At overtly educational facilities like Vancouver, his words might ring true. At places like the Miami Seaquarium, or any SeaWorld facility, it is quite a different story. Taking your family to a SeaWorld facility or to the Seaquarium, is akin going to a nautical circus show; the emphasis is on crowd-pleasing stunts, like the trainers astride Lolita’s pectoral fins when she breaches. Trainers routinely ride the backs of the orcas at SeaWorld. Crowds learn only bare essentials about the animals, if they bother to pay any attention amid all the glitz.

  “SeaWorld’s primary motto always was, ‘Entertainment, education, conservation,’” says John Hall, a marine biologist who worked as a researcher for SeaWorld from 1986 to 1990. “And entertainment was always first. If it were a headline, entertainment would have been in 64 point, education might have been in 14, and conservation would have been in 8 point.”

  If you ask anyone at these facilities about wild killer whales—especially those in the Northwest, where the effects of the captures that founded the industry are still felt by the surviving resident whales—you are given the “scary oceans” line that in the wild, orcas face many threats to their survival, including lack of salmon, pollution, and boats, and they don’t face these threats at SeaWorld, so they are better off there. You are also likely to get false information about their longevity. SeaWorld guides like to claim that wild whales only live about 25 or 30 years. (The reality is that they have a lifespan similar to that of humans; the upper limit of age for wild males appears to be about 60, and females have lived to be 100.)

  Lolita performs a backwards breach as part of her twice-daily routine at Miami Seaquarium.

  SeaWorld officials defend their education outreach programs, saying they’ve been upgraded in recent years. Industry officials say the company changed its philosophy dramatically after Anheuser-Busch bought it from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and it has maintained those standards since being acquired by the Blackstone Group.

  Miami Seaquarium officials offer a similar defense of their education work. Still, it’s unlikely a child will watch a Lolita show, a glitzy affair with leaping dolphins and Lolita’s playful stunts, and come away knowing much relevant about the animal beyond basic physiology. Even the Seaquarium’s public-relations director admits the show won’t tell kids where Lolita comes from, what life for orcas is like in the wild, what threats face her native L pod. Nothing they will have gleaned from the show would contribute to understanding the conservation issues orcas represent. But then, these are the kinds of facts that prompt children to ask uncomfortable questions like, “Why isn’t Lolita with her family, Mommy?”

  Even an industry stalwart like John Nightingale is uncomfortable with some of the displays and the emphasis on stunts that are the métier of many captive-orca facilities: “I do have a bone to pick with some institutions. I think that kind of message is counter-productive.” However, he defends the stunts and shows, which the Vancouver Aquarium itself disdained, as part of an effort to get people involved.

  John Hall, noting that performing routines with unnatural behaviors have been linked to cases of mental instability in the whales, thinks the stunts are a rip-off. “You have to remember that what people see in these shows isn’t a killer whale,” he contends. “It’s a circus act, nothing more.”

  Nonetheless, for those who suggest that marine parks’ sole interest is snagging the $100 or more the average customer drops with each visit, industry officials point to the research funded by the packed stands. SeaWorld, says John Nightingale, is “able to do things, to build things, to provide advances in medical care, that we can’t, because of their size and budget. They’ve provided huge increases in our knowledge base about some aspects of whales and dolphins that you could never get in the wild.” Similarly, the Vancouver Aquarium has long funded the ground-breaking work of Northwest marine scientists like John Ford and Graeme Ellis.

  However, there may be limits to the
science coming out of places like SeaWorld. John Hall recalls watching the company’s chief veterinarian blithely dismiss a proposal to do energetics research on wild mammals, as well as other research that didn’t directly affect SeaWorld’s chief concern of keeping the captives alive and healthy. “Here was this organization that was generating, even then, $5-600 million a year, and they were putting essentially none of it back into really understanding what was going on with these guys, what it took for them to make a living in the wild,” says Hall. “Here was this tremendous capability, and they simply weren’t using it.”

  The two sides—scientists inside the industry, and those outside who ally themselves with whale activists—aren’t shy about drawing knives to impugn each other’s motives, either. Ken Balcomb is frequently portrayed by those in the Alliance camp as a self-important loose cannon: “Money and ego are the motivating factors,” says Nightingale. “The activists shout money, money, money at Wometco and the Miami Seaquarium. But Ken Balcomb’s whole living is tied up in shaking these trees and raising money to study this and study that.”

  There’s no doubt that Balcomb, whose chief living for many years was made from an Earthwatch grant that subsidized the Center for Whale Research’s summer program, runs a well-oiled operation that one researcher called a “propaganda machine.” However, scientists who choose to try to make a living outside the establishment usually have to resort to such methods to raise funds for their research.

  Industry officials, for their part, like to claim the orcas’ best interests comprise their only motives: “The Alliance is a number of public-display facilities that care very much about these animals. That’s where we’re coming from,” says AMMP’s Marilee Keef.

  Both sides, for that matter, claim to have the animals’ welfare foremost in their minds, but the industry’s credibility in this regard is thin, to put it charitably. This is, after all, an industry that was founded on cruel animal-capture techniques considered inhumane and illegal today. While orca care in captivity has improved measurably in the recent past, the industry still regularly engages in appalling practices like “whale laundering” or warehousing orcas captured overseas (orcas are not legally available in U.S. waters) at a windowless backroom tank in another nation until sufficient time passes for it to be imported to a U.S. facility as a transfer, all so the American company doesn’t have to obtain a U.S. capture permit. The warehouses are also used to house uncooperative or aggressive animals. The warehousing of Junior, an Icelandic orca who was captured in 1986 and languished without daylight in an Ontario warehouse for four years before he finally died in 1994 may be the most atrocious example of this.

  Most of all, we now know without question that the fifty-year record of orca captivity has demonstrated that the only upside for captivity is for the humans who are entertained and, perhaps, educated by them and for the humans who make large profits from them. For the whales, it is unremittingly bad news:

  Most wild orcas have died prematurely in captivity. Of the more than 130 orcas who have been captured in the wild since 1964, only 13 remain alive today (not counting the eight orcas recently captured by Russian fishermen, whose fate is currently unknown). Most were captured at relatively young ages, and many likely would still be alive in the wild. In contrast to many animals in zoos and aquariums, who often enjoy comparable if not better lifespans in captivity, killer whales have dramatically lower lifespans in captivity than they do in the wild: Wild whales of all sexes live only an average 8.5 years in captivity, while in the wild the average lifespan is 30 years for males, and 50 for females. Captive-born orcas have shown a high mortality rate as well.

  There is a high rate of lethal infection in killer whales. Many of these are induced by the whales’ dental issues, caused by the tendency to chew on metal gates and concrete pools. Even their dental care, when the pulp is simply drilled out of their teeth and the hole left uncapped, causes problems, because food collects in the unfilled holes and creates even more infections and can lead to septic poisoning if allowed to fester. There is also a high rate of respiratory infections.

  There is a high rate of aberrant behavior in captive orcas, particularly among those who are required to perform unnatural behaviors, including the entertaining stunts that wow so many spectators. The captive orcas frequently engage in aggressive and violent behaviors with each other, something rarely if ever observed in the wild. Much of this is believed to be the product of marine parks’ tendencies to throw together orcas from disparate social groups and ecotypes (transients thrown in together with residents, Icelandic whales with Northwest orcas) so that the cultural boundaries that have defined these whales’ behaviors all their lives is discarded and ignored.

  The only times that humans have ever been injured or killed by orcas have occurred in captivity. In the wild, their relationship with humans has been unremittingly tolerant and genial, but in captivity, people have been mauled, crushed, raked, and killed.

  Especially their trainers, as the Tilikum fiasco demonstrated.

  • • •

  By late 2013, the sensitivities of everyone working in the marine-park industry seemed to be on high alert, thanks to what people were calling “the Blackfish effect.” There were many people entering their stadiums now asking that touchy question at the core of the national debate the film ignited: Is it ethical to keep large, wild-born killer whales in captivity? For many people who viewed the film, the answer is an obvious and resounding “No.” The evidence it presents against captivity is both wide-ranging and scientifically (not to mention morally) persuasive. However, even people who haven’t seen the film often come away with the same abiding impression after seeing orcas in pools at SeaWorld in its three locations (Orlando, San Antonio, and San Diego) as well as at the Miami Seaquarium: There is something deeply Not Right about keeping such large, magnificent, and highly intelligent animals in such relatively small and sensorally sterile enclosures.

  There were several Blackfish-related protests, including an attempt to block a SeaWorld float at the Rose Parade in Pasadena. Fans of the film organized a boycott at the theme park of a rock-concert series, with various well-known rock and country bands, including Willie Nelson, Cheap Trick, Heart, REO Speedwagon, and Martina McBride cancelling performances. Ann Wilson, the lead singer of Heart, told Rolling Stone: “What SeaWorld does is slavery.”

  In the spring of 2013, SeaWorld stock, taken public by Blackstone, the holding company that bought SeaWorld from Anheuser Busch in 2011, plummeted and then lingered in the doldrums well through 2014. At one point, CNBC stock analyst Jim Cramer advised clients to dump their SeaWorld stock after a bad week of missed earnings expectations and advised the company, “Free Willy!”

  In the meantime, Blackfish garnered increasing attention as one of the most-watched documentaries of the year. It was shortlisted for the Oscars in the documentary competition but did not make the final cut when the five finalists were announced in January. The film’s many fans took to Twitter to complain about the snub, and SeaWorld celebrated when its stock spiked higher briefly. However, even as people walked out of theaters after seeing the film determined never to turn the stiles at SeaWorld again, many found themselves asking, What next? Now that they are aware of the problems with killer whales in captivity, what should their next step be? If we want to get serious about returning captive-born whales to the wild, what whale should they focus their efforts on?

  The answer, according to most people familiar with orca captivity, is clear: Lolita.

  • • •

  Lolita is a remarkable whale, and her case is especially striking because of the tiny size of her enclosure, the smallest orca pool in North America. It is a crumbling structure, but its owner cannot improve the situation because of the park’s location in the Village of Key Biscayne, where planners are adamantly opposed to any expansion of the park because of their tiny island’s innate limitations.

  Lolita gladly approaches poolside admirers before her perfor
mances.

  It is Lolita, more than any other captive orca, who offers the potential to answer the big question that hovered around the Blackfish debate: Why not return wild-born orcas to their native waters and pods?

  Free Willy and its fantasy of an orca simply leaping over a breakwater to freedom notwithstanding, returning orcas to the wild is not a simple thing. Indeed, as the Keiko saga manifested, it is a complex operation that requires many layers of research and knowledge and physical care of the animals, beginning with identifying any wild orca’s natal pod and its location.

  Captive whales become inured to human contact and may have real difficulty separating from humans for their social needs as well as for their food. Whales may also carry diseases into the wild, and their dental care (most captive orcas have multiple cavities that require constant maintenance) makes it even more difficult to release them in the wild and expect them to survive. Of the 52 killer whales in captivity at various marine parks around the world (not including eight recently captured in Russian waters), only 13 were born in the wild. Not even the most fervent whale advocates propose releasing captive-born orcas into the wild (although they would argue for improving their living conditions), but keeping wild orcas in concrete pools, they argue, is simply cruel.

  Lolita, despite the incredible length of time she has been in captivity (only SeaWorld’s Corky, at the San Diego facility, has lived longer in a tank), remains a superb candidate for release. For one thing, her teeth are nearly perfect and her health is terrific. It is hard to find anyone not associated with the marine-park industry who isn’t appalled by the tiny size of her enclosure, and many of those associated with the industry will privately admit to deep misgivings about her situation.