Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  “The slavery lawsuit didn’t succeed for a simple reason, and that was that they wanted the judge to interpret the Constitution in a way that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, which was to see orcas as human slaves,” says Lori Marino. “Clearly the 13th Amendment did not provide for orcas. You can go there, but the first thing you have to do is, orcas have to be persons—non-human persons.”

  The backlash against orca captivity created by Blackfish, however, has revived a national discussion of the topic. Increasingly, the public is awakening to the reality that the scientific ethicists have been raising for many years, namely that the more we learn about killer whales, the more we realize that their continued captivity, especially as it is practiced today, is the wrong thing.

  • • •

  Among the many things we have learned about killer whales in the forty years since we began capturing them and putting them in concrete tanks, probably the most striking is their extremely social natures. The lifelong bonds between mothers and their calves, as well as their fellow pod members, are deep and profound in ways we can only glimpse like fleeting shadows. There is almost no respect for those bonds for orcas in captivity, however, especially when it comes to their breeding program. Young calves are routinely separated from their mothers shortly after birth, in large part because so many of the females in captivity were either captured quite young or were themselves born in captivity and never learned proper nursing skills from their mothers, as they would have in the wild, and so most newborns have to be hand-fed by humans if their owners wish to see them reach adulthood.

  Neither is there any respect for the profound cultural differences among orcas. At marine parks, orcas from ecotypes around the globe—some of them fish-eating resident whales, some of them mammal-eaters—are thrown in together, usually with no consideration for their ecotype of origin, let alone their home pod.

  Perhaps most egregious, though, is the stultifying reality of their confinement. Not only are they prevented from swimming the vast distances to which they are accustomed, their pools are invariably featureless concrete tanks, the likes of which, for creatures used to perceiving the world through sound, is essentially the same as imprisoning humans in small white featureless rooms.

  All of these stresses add up to shortened lifespans, unhealthy animals, and most of all unhappy animals, capable of acts of aggression that are unseen among wild killer whales, especially toward their human handlers. Tilikum is far from the only psychologically unstable orca among the ranks of the captives, nor the only one who has acted aggressively against trainers, a reality that Blackfish illustrated vividly. The only logical and ethical conclusion is that a new program, creating a new business model, should be undertaken at marine parks: retirement, rehabilitation, and potentially a return to the wild for some whales. It would include captive-born as well as wild-born killer whales, and it would mean an end to all further captive breeding programs.

  Naomi Rose, herself a onetime Northwest orca researcher who helped oversee Keiko’s final years while with the Humane Society and is now a lead scientist at the Animal Welfare Institute, has proposed a new paradigm for the SeaWorlds of the world: to relinquish their continued use of these animals for entertainment and to instead embrace education and conservation as the centerpieces of their business. “These facilities can work with experts around the world to create sanctuaries where captive orcas can be rehabilitated and retired,” explains Rose. “These sanctuaries would be sea pens or netted-off bays or coves, in temperate to cold-water natural habitat. They would offer the animals respite from performing and the constant exposure to a parade of strangers (an entirely unnatural situation for a species whose social groupings are based on family ties and stability; “strangers” essentially do not exist in orca society). Incompatible animals would not be forced to cohabit the same enclosures and family groups would be preserved.”

  There are many wild-animal sanctuaries in operation around the globe for a variety of species, operating on a nonprofit business model, and Rose argues that such an operation would fit in well even with a business such as SeaWorld, which is driven by profits and ticket sales, so long as it was willing to move to the locales where the rehabilitation was taking place. “Wildlife sanctuaries are sometimes open to the public, although public interaction with the animals is usually minimized,” says Rose. “A visitor’s center can offer education, real-time remote viewing of the animals, a gift shop, and in the case of whales and dolphins can even be a base for responsible whale watching if the sanctuary is in a suitable location for that activity.”

  SeaWorld, of course, has so far ignored such importuning as ridiculous and idealistic, while defending its continued practices of holding the animals in captivity. Mostly it does so on dubious grounds. It claims its programs are educational and inspire children, but in reality children are fed a heavy dose of misinformation at these facilities. It claims it gives the animals better and longer lives in captivity, which while true for some species, is decidedly a falsehood when it comes to killer whales; and it claims it contributes to conservation and rescue efforts, but it has done not a single meaningful thing to help restore the Southern Resident population in the Salish Sea on which its industry was founded.

  When SeaWorld guides talk about those wild populations at all, it is to offer a stark contrast with the “safe” and sterile environment in which the orcas they possess now live, as though it were obviously preferable to be fed dead herring all day rather than chasing down salmon with one’s pod in native waters. They make the oceans out to be scary places rather than the natural and free environments in which these creatures were always meant to live.

  There is a powerful element of truth in their observations. Wild killer whales indeed face all kinds of challenges to their sheer survival out there in the ocean. However, that does not mean captivity is a better place for them than the wild. It only means that the people who fear for their well-being in captivity, and wish to see it ended, also need to be engaged in helping killer whales to thrive in the wild.

  • • •

  Killer whales around the world face a variety of threats. Crozet Island orcas are still being killed by fishermen from whose lines they mischievously steal a whole day’s catch. In Russian waters, orcas are being captured and hauled off to inland aquariums, including eight who were captured for display during the 2014 Winter Olympics. Alaskan killer whales are still recovering from the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. A shrinking fishery in the North Atlantic continues to stress the populations there.

  However, the only known endangered population is the Southern Residents; they have not yet recovered from the effects of losing a generation’s worth of young orcas during the capture period of the ’60s and ‘70s. The declining salmon runs, the buildup of toxins and pollutants, the increase in vessels and their accompanying noise have all played a role in increasing their vulnerability and keeping their numbers low. Looming future threats, such as increasing the possibility of a toxic oil spill in their home waters, make their future very cloudy indeed.

  Brad Hanson, the NMFS whale scientist, is concerned about the precarious position in which the Southern Residents now find themselves, some of it an outcome of their evolution. “To me, it’s fascinating—this adaptation where we see these small, social odontocete populations,” Hanson says. “You see it with pseudorca, with killer whales, with belugas, with Baird’s beaked whales. When you think about the populations of other animals, which number in the hundreds of thousands or millions or whatever—to me, what it shows is the fragility of these populations. Because there aren’t very many of them. And yet they’ve come to exist in these very small groups and enclaves. The point being, the fact that they do exist in very specialized environments and there are a small number of animals, it’s a very fragile situation. And I think the public has a really hard time trying to comprehend all the insults to the environment that we inflict, and in doing so inflict them on these animals and make them ev
en more fragile.”

  Paul Spong sees the same precarious state: “It’s very unfortunate for the Southern Residents that they are in a place that we have chosen to occupy so heavily,” he says. However, he fears for the future of both the Southern and Northern Resident whales. “I am concerned for what the future holds for all these orcas, and for all kinds of marine life. I just know that we impact them in all kinds of ways. A lot of it is inadvertent, and a lot of it is quite deliberate.

  “Just looking at the issue of pollution, and looking at what it would take to change things around to the point where there would be a significant difference for the orcas, and for other marine mammals. It’s massive, because there are so many entry points for toxins into the ocean system.”

  As Spong explains, these are all issues in which every person who lives in the Northwest can play a role. “You need to start at the personal level,” he says. “People in their own ordinary lives can pretty easily make decisions about things that are appropriate and not appropriate.”

  Hanson agrees, but also sees the complexity: “It’s hard for people to understand how to make a difference. They want to help the animals, but they really don’t know how,” he says. “It’s hard to tell people when they say, ‘What do we do?’ And it’s a hard question, because there’s so much stuff going on at so many different levels.”

  For the Southern Residents, those issues run from prey availability to toxins to vessel noise. Do you use yard fertilizers that run off into local waters and harm salmon? Do you go out to see whales in a boat that ignores the self-enforced 100-yard regulatory distance from the orcas? Or do you make conscious choices to do otherwise?

  “How does your daily behavior connect to that?” wonders Hanson. “We all have an impact, and it’s hard to be conscious of what those impacts are. You go home and you fire up the furnace or you flush the toilet, and it’s water from a river system that salmon once depended on. You know, we live in a heavily altered system that sort of marginally supports salmon stocks. But does it make sense to rip out whatever to do stuff to make them strong again? We have to figure out the tradeoffs.”

  Some of these tradeoffs involve difficult land-use issues. In the Skagit River valley, where a restored river system would probably yield one of the largest bounties of salmon for Puget Sound orcas to devour, in the longtime feuding between farmers, who now occupy much of the river’s delta, and tribal and conservationist interests trying to restore salmon runs, a stalemate has ensured that few improvements are in the offing.

  That, if anything, reflects the greatest difference between men and orcas, and the trait we would be wisest to learn from them: cooperation. Killer whales are deeply wired to cooperate with one another, to assist each other, to join forces in order to achieve their goals. Our lack of the same trait, ironically, is what in the end most endangers them, and should we ever heed their example and learn that trait, conversely, it could be their salvation.

  “There are a lot of ways the killer whales are an indicator species,” says San Juan Island naturalist Monika Wieland. “They can tell us a lot about what’s going on out there. I mean, the salmon are so crucial for the entire ecosystem here, and the whales are sort of a visual indicator for us of what might be going on out there. You just hope that people are listening to that message—if the whales are not here, especially.” She knows that there are reasons, including the whales’ disappearing act in the summer of 2013, for pessimism, too. “There’s been a lot of doom and gloom,” she says. “I know of a lot of naturalists who say things like, ‘I don’t want to just stay here and watch them die.’ People are almost ready to give up on them.” She smiles. “I’m not giving up on these guys just yet. Just like the salmon on the Elwha, we know that nature is incredibly resilient. I think if we give them any sort of opportunity, they will take advantage of it.”

  • • •

  Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropology, got his start by spending time among the people who believed that the killer whales were their ancestors, the Kwakwaka’waka. It changed the world.

  As a young man, Boas spent a great deal of time, between 1886 and 1890, off and on, in the Northwest, collecting myths and legends and traveling among the various tribes that were scattered along the coastlines, mostly straggling remnants that had managed to survive the onslaught of smallpox and cholera that had nearly destroyed most coastal villages between 1800 and 1870. Over time, he became especially close to the Kwakwaka’waka (whose name, pronounced KWA-kwa-KEW-aka, Boas shortened to Kwakiutl). In 1892, he organized a delegation of fourteen of the tribe’s men and women to represent themselves in an exhibit of a mock cedar-longhouse village created for the Chicago World’s Fair, where they were gawked at by fairgoers.

  Like the killer whales, the Kwakwaka’waka had a matrilineal familial and tribal structures. Boas eventually ascertained that this structure had evolved from patriarchal structures with men at the head, something that ran counter to then-popular theories about how cultures “naturally” evolved into patriarchies, which were seen as their highest development. Boas began to challenge these theories, arguing that instead of the biological forces that were popularly believed to drive human behavior, cultural forces were what make us tick.

  Franz Boas’ photographer captured this image of a Kwakwaka’waka man demonstrating a dance performance in a killer whale transformation mask. Taken in Chicago in 1904 for the Field Museum.

  In the end, after he had returned to Columbia University and founded the study of anthropology as an academic discipline there, the ideas Boas developed during his time among the Kwakiutl not only profoundly shaped academic thought, but they challenged the reigning worldview of the time: white supremacy, and its assorted pseudoscientific manifestations, particularly the fake “science” of racial purity known as eugenics. At the time, it was widely believed that there was a hierarchy of races and civilizations, with Western white society the supreme outcome of evolutionary forces. Tribesmen such as the Kwakwak’awaka were, in this view, hopelessly backward and primitive, scarcely capable of reasoned thought, let alone sophisticated art forms or other cultural expressions. In some eugenicist views, it was not even clear if they were fully human. Boas, himself a Jew who had observed the resemblance of the supremacist worldview to deepening anti-Semitism in his native Europe, had come to know from deep experience that this was utter bosh.

  Boas’ theories, known popularly today as “multiculturalism,” held that cultures cannot be ranked higher or lower, advanced or primitive, superior or inferior; people form these judgments based on the biases inherent from their own cultural learning, he said. At the time, these ideas were widely ridiculed, but times have changed. Not only have Boas’ views completely replaced the old “biological racism” of his time and now hold sway throughout academia, but multiculturalism is also the dominant worldview of most modern democratic societies. White supremacy and its racist cohort are permanently discredited.

  So, perhaps it is fitting that today we can turn to the same wellspring of transformative thought as a touchstone for examining not just our relationship with each other as humans, but our species’ relationship to the world in which we live and to the animals who inhabit it. We would do well to learn from the people who themselves have gleaned real wisdom from being in the world of whales.

  The cornerstone of Kwakwaka’waka religious thought is the codependency of all of nature; no part of the natural order can exist without the rest. There is no such thing as self-sufficiency, whether for humans or their tribes, for animals or the supernatural beings whose powers they represent. Humans are somewhat naturally at the center of their universe, but they accept that all other members of their common world possess not just an indestructible and unique quality, but a spiritual and material parity in that world. “Kwakiutl religion represents the concern of the people to occupy their own proper place within the total system of life, and to act responsibly within it, so as to acquire and control the powers that sustain life,�
� explained Boas’ student, Irving Goldman, in his study of the tribe’s theology, The Mouth of Heaven.

  These concerns find their clearest expression in the mythology of animals and the supernatural beings who take their forms. In the Kwakwaka’waka world, humans and animals have real kinship, reflected in the view of killer whales as their ancestors; they have social and spiritual ties that can never be severed. Indeed, they believe that when the tribesmen who hunt marine mammals die, they return to the undersea village of their orca ancestors. In this universe, humans are the recipients of powers, and the givers of those powers are the animals and the supernatural forces they represent. Of all the animals in their universe, the orca is the most powerful, one of the few (along with the raven, the otter, and the wolf) capable of giving a man enough power to become a shaman.

  Acquiring a worldview like this does not require us to submit to a belief in supernatural beings, but it does require us to abjure our arrogance, which, as we have seen, is already at the core of our relationship not just with killer whales, but our world generally. Killer whales inherently challenge our assumptions of species superiority, as well as supremacy. Beyond being merely physically more powerful (at least, without tools or technology), orcas can challenge us in the realm of intellectual prowess as well, particularly given the added dimension with which they can gather information about our world and their proven ability to manipulate acoustics to do that. It is also hard to argue with six million years of actual supremacy as the undisputed lords of the oceans when it comes to evolutionary success, species-wise.

  Before about 1990, we could reasonably plead ignorance about the unflattering realities that orcas present in relation to humans, especially the way in which what we have learned about them shines a spotlight on our own cognitive limitations. The dirty truth of dolphin and orca studies is that they have established fairly clearly that human beings may well lack the cognitive capacity to understand how all cetaceans communicate; we’re just not that acoustically sophisticated.