Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity

by David Kirby

  Dan had closely followed the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which was now in its waning days. “Your President Bush just rejected the Soviet-Iraqi peace plan and issued a twenty-four-hour ultimatum,” he told Naomi. Iraq would have to leave Kuwait in order to avoid a ground war. Dan said the whole conflict could be over by the weekend.

  Naomi, a left-of-center progressive, was no fan of the war, but she was glad to hear it was wrapping up successfully. “That’s good news, Dan. Thanks for telling me. Anything else going on in the world?”

  “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. There was some kind of incident down at SeaLand, in Victoria. The killer whales were acting up. Apparently someone died.”

  “My god. When did that happen?”

  “This afternoon. I didn’t get all the details. But they’re talking about it on the radio. Why don’t you tune in?”

  Naomi was exhausted, and she had used up her generator fuel for the day. She would look into it soon. “Good night, Dan,” she said with a wry grin. “Thanks for scaring the crap out of me. That was nice.”

  The late winter weather was bright and cold. Naomi turned on the radio, but the news was almost exclusively from the Gulf. Nothing about a death at SeaLand. Eventually she bundled herself up, jumped into the lodge’s little skiff, and steered it toward Telegraph Cove, a tiny wood-milling center located around the bend, to see what she could find out.

  Naomi was off to see her good friend Jim Borrowman. He would know what had happened. Jim and his business partner, Bill MacKay, operated the Stubbs Island Whale Watching company aboard their custom-built metal-hulled vessel, the Lukwa. Jim was somewhat of a local expert on killer whales, having worked with author Erich Hoyt in researching his groundbreaking book Orca: The Whale Called Killer, a 1980 paean to the Northern Resident community.

  Naomi pulled out of Hidden Cove and braved the choppy waters, heading into the strait and turning right, past Beaver Cove and its masses of logs—felled not by beavers but lumberjacks. From there she headed into the protected haven of Telegraph Cove. Jim was working on his boat.

  “What happened at SeaLand?” she asked, curious for news.

  “It was a trainer,” Jim said slowly. “Young girl named Keltie Byrne, a championship swimmer from Victoria.” She had slipped by the pool and the whales took her into the water. It took them two hours to recover her body.

  Naomi was taken aback. It was so hard to believe those whales had killed someone. “My god, I was just there, little more than two years ago, when my mom came to visit,” she replied. In the summer of 1988 the two of them had driven together from the north island to Victoria, where they had been wowed by the high tea at the sumptuous Empress Hotel before heading over to Oak Bay, where SeaLand was located, to see the orcas.

  Naomi had watched as Haida, Nootka, and Tilikum performed their “behaviors,” and she remembered thinking how rinky-dink the pool had been, how cheesy the little show had seemed. She had no recollection if any of the young trainers there that day were named Keltie.

  “But that’s strange,” Naomi said. “Orcas don’t attack people. Not that I know of.”

  “To tell you the truth, Naomi, I really don’t think those whales killed her on purpose. You know as well as I do that, when you see them in the wild and you watch how they work and how they move and how they socialize and everything they do, you know that they won’t hurt you. I’ve tried to photograph orcas underwater and they just turn and swim away.”

  Naomi had seen that happen herself. She had seen people get in the water with wild orcas, and the whales really weren’t interested. There was a silence. “So what do you think could’ve happened in Victoria, Jim?”

  “I think once Keltie was in there, she panicked a bit, and the whales freaked out and started getting rambunctious—maybe playing, maybe pissed off, who knows? But things happen, and a human dies. These are big whales.”

  “You think they were just playing?” Naomi asked.

  “I don’t know. I think orcas get neurotic in these swimming pools. When I watch them in a place like SeaLand, well, I just think that neurotic is a good word for what they become.”

  * * *

  “Did you hear about that trainer, up in Canada?” The question swirled around SeaWorld Florida like a bad virus on a wide-body jet. But it was difficult to get much information. Computer nerds were navigating something new, called the World Wide Web, on a thingamajig called America Online, but few animal trainers had access to such wizardry. Even if they did, downloading news from distant Victoria would have been difficult.

  It was February 1991. Mobile phones still looked like bricks, and most people got their daily news the old-fashioned way: through newspapers, networks, or neighborly gossip.

  That winter at SeaWorld, details on Tilikum’s tantrum were managed from the top. Canadian papers were reporting that Keltie had been dragged screaming into the pool, was alive for many minutes during the incident, and that the whales repeatedly dunked her and prevented her from reaching the edge. But many trainers at SeaWorld, with no access to that news, came away with a different impression altogether.

  Jeff Ventre brought up the tragedy with his friend and fellow trainer Samantha Berg one day behind the show pool at Whale and Dolphin Stadium, where they both worked in the popular “New Friends” show. He said he’d been told by management that Keltie died of hypothermia. “It sounded like she was an inexperienced trainer. The accident was probably her fault,” he said. “Their tanks are filled with ocean water, and she didn’t have a wet suit on.”

  “Holy shit,” Sam said. “The water is really cold up there.” Sam was right. Water temperature in Victoria was about forty-eight degrees.

  “I heard she died quickly,” Jeff said. “From what I can gather, the whales blocked her from getting out. Then Tilikum grabbed her body. He thought it was a toy, and he wouldn’t let the females have it.”

  But, Sam wanted to know, why wouldn’t the whales let Keltie get out of the pool? Jeff explained that the orcas there had never been trained to get used to people in the water with them. “There was no water work at SeaLand,” he said. At SeaWorld, in contrast, there were regular safety and rescue drills. Trainers were taught to go limp if they were grabbed, so the whales might lose interest. Whales were trained to close their mouths while swimming and were desensitized to stay calm and circle the pool if someone unexpectedly fell in.

  Jeff had already done a tour of duty over at Shamu Stadium, back in 1988. Even though he’d spent that year as a lowly fish-bucket scrubber, he did manage to get in the water for some practice training with a few of the orcas once in a while. They were undisturbed by his presence because they had been trained to be undisturbed.

  Jeff, a former high school baseball player and fraternity president with a solid build, dark hair, and hazel eyes, had been at SeaWorld for more than three years now; Samantha, a wisecracking, five-foot-two New Yorker with brown eyes and hair, had been there just one year. They both had studied life science in college, Jeff at Florida State University and Sam at Cornell.

  SeaWorld was not exactly a hotbed of scientific discourse. A few days earlier, staff at all three marine animal stadiums—Shamu, Whale and Dolphin, and Sea Lion and Otter—were summarily called to an informational briefing at a meeting room over at the water-ski stadium. These powwows happened every so often, Jeff explained to Sam as they walked to the meeting.

  As they spoke, they strolled past swarms of tourists from all over the world, many in shorts and tank tops, pushing strollers and popping into souvenir shops crammed with whale and dolphin plush toys, or refreshing themselves from the heat at little stands selling Anheuser-Busch beer, ice-cold and on tap. SeaWorld really was a “world” unto itself, with 220 landscaped acres brimming with pavilions, stadiums, thrill rides, stores, restaurants, plazas, lakes, ponds, and a four-hundred-foot Sky Tower.

  The park’s training department was large and growing. Sam and Jeff were just two of nearly fifty people at SeaWorld who were qualified to w
ork directly with the animals. Everyone began his or her career as an apprentice trainer, which typically lasted about a year, before moving up to associate trainer, for twelve to eighteen months, then trainer, and, a number of years after that, senior trainer. Some people remained at the senior trainer level, others went on to vie for the limited number of supervisor positions.

  Trainer meetings were essentially pep talks aimed at getting the staff to present the park and its operations in the most flattering light possible to the public. A small dose of eighth-grade science was often peppered into the talks. At this gathering, some of the company’s top brass showed up to lecture their underlings about nutrients, food, marine mammal energy requirements, and the “restaurant-quality fish” (a common SeaWorld mantra) that everyone was feeding to the animals.

  “We measure food energy in units called calories,” one of the bosses said slowly, as if speaking to third-graders. Jeff and Sam looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

  “One calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of a glass of water by one degree Celsius,” the speaker continued.

  Sam had to say something. She raised her hand. “Excuse me?” she said politely. “I think you just misspoke.”

  “I what?” the executive snapped.

  “You said ‘a glass.’ You said one calorie raises a glass of water by one degree. It’s not a glass of water; it’s a gram of water.”

  “Well … you get my point,” the boss said, flustered and red-faced. “What I was trying to say is that we meet the caloric needs of all animals in our collection.”

  When Jeff started at SeaWorld, in the fall of 1987, he thought he would be working at some kind of Jacques Cousteau–like oceanic research center, where marine biologists and other scientists would be huddled around dolphin tanks, clad in white lab coats, and making copious marks on clipboards every time an animal did something interesting.

  Jeff knew SeaWorld had a show business angle. He grew up near Orlando, raised on heart-racing images of athletic trainers in colorful wet suits shooting from the rostrums of massive orcas and somersaulting into the clear turquoise water. It looked cool.

  Jeff’s new career, then, seemed an appealing marriage of physical and intellectual activity. He believed he would be applying his biology background to evidence-based science, in addition to flying through the air across the whale pool.

  Jeff was wrong. Little scholarly endeavor seemed to be going on behind the swaying palms and dense tropical hedges that line SeaWorld’s perimeter. But Jeff got over his disappointment. Working at the park was cool and was fun. Besides, Jeff was already there, on the inside—one of the lucky few to be selected from an overflowing pile of résumés. People would kill for this job, so why leave it?

  And there were other benefits. Jeff was a daredevil, hotdogging water-work star at SeaWorld. The job required a lot of physical training and athleticism, so being healthy, fit, and good-looking came with the work. A SeaWorld trainer was something of a local celebrity, and sometimes people would recognize Jeff in a bar and buy him a drink. Most people thought that being a trainer at SeaWorld must have been the most exciting job in the world. It didn’t hurt when trying to meet women, either. Most of them didn’t know he was only making about $7 an hour.

  Now, in 1991, Jeff loved his life at Whale and Dolphin Stadium, where, instead of scrubbing fish buckets for orcas, he was working up close with dozens of extraordinary animals. He was swimming with, surfing atop, or launching from the gregarious bottlenose dolphins, white-sided dolphins, the mysterious and beguiling belugas, also known as white whales, and the incredibly smart and nimble false killer whales. Torpedo-like, all-black, and much sleeker than orcas, false killer whales are related to them through the family Delphinidae.

  Jeff realized that the “New Friends” show at Whale and Dolphin Stadium was a bit corny and lacked a solid educational component that could teach visitors about how these animals lived in the wild. But it was a blast to perform. False killer whales are able to do nearly all the same behaviors as orcas, but they can do so within much tighter quarters. Hana and Yaki were his favorites. False killer whales are great for doing the kind of hotdogging work that Jeff excelled at, including the crowd-pleasing “stand-on,” in which a whale would push him by the feet quickly through the water, then lunge up perpendicularly into the air and straight back down again, with Jeff balanced perfectly on its rostrum. Jeff was astonished by their power, speed, grace, and agility—like riding a finely tuned Ducati motorbike.

  Jeff’s friend and confidant Samantha Berg was not about to give up her job either. She loved working at SeaWorld, though she did feel out of place with her dark, curly hair and the only Jewish surname in the department (there was one African-American; the rest were white and decidedly gentile). Nearly all the other female trainers were tall, fair-haired, and willowy—except for one other dark-haired New Yorker, of Italian descent, who worked at Sea Lion and Otter Stadium. When Sam was transferred to the stadium, the two became great friends. They both thought it was pretty funny they had been hired at all.

  Still, Sam had the credentials that SeaWorld valued. She was not only pretty, she had been a competitive swimmer, gymnast, and runner in high school and learned stagecraft by osmosis growing up in New York. There were after-school and summer drama programs and staged theater performances in high school. She also had an animal-science background. Sam was athletic, and smart, a former lifeguard with a sharp wit that could slice through pastrami.

  Sam Berg was born in Queens and grew up on Long Island. As early as the first grade, she had the distinct idea of working with dolphins and whales, probably from a combination of watching The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau along with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on television.

  In 1985, Sam went upstate to Ithaca, New York, to get her animal-science degree at Cornell University. She spent her junior year at the Shoals Marine Lab, a joint operation of Cornell and the University of New Hampshire, on Appledore Island, about six miles off the New England coast. Samantha also loved animals, especially her charges at the “New Friends” show, where she spent most of her time working with the bottlenose dolphins and the mysterious belugas—those midsize white whales with the gentle faces, bulbous heads, and playful personalities.

  Sometimes the belugas grew a little too playful. One of them, a male named Shadow, whose stage name was Belinda, was part of the “Belinda and Bianca” underwater ballet segment of the show. (Stage names are used for most animals so, when an animal dies, the character can live on.) But during downtimes, when the whales were on display behind the Plexiglas walls of the main pool, the male would sometimes get excited, extrude his long, pink penis from his genital slit, and wave it about. Whenever this happened, some tourist would invariably cry out, “Quick! Get the trainers! Belinda’s giving birth!”

  Despite her science background, Sam couldn’t help but sense a certain mystical kinship with the intelligent and empathetic dolphins at SeaWorld. She had felt that way since she’d walked through the front gates on her first day at work. A supervisor had met her near the main entrance and driven her over to Whale and Dolphin. He introduced Sam to the training staff, including Jeff Ventre, then excused himself to tend to a behavioral matter with one of the dolphins.

  “Why don’t you go have a look around outside, Sam?” he said. It was like asking a kid to wander around FAO Schwarz alone. Sam walked out to the backstage area, where several small pools were connected to each other and to the main pool up front. There, the magic of show business unfolded—up to eight times a day during peak periods—in the “New Friends” whale and dolphin spectacular. Sam walked past the medical pool, shallow and easily drained in order to dry-dock the animals to take urine and blood samples and perform other veterinary procedures.

  In the next pool over, gated off from the rest, two bottlenose dolphins leapt from the blue water in elegant flips and tight, graceful bows. They kept trying to see out over their tank, to get a glim
pse of this person who had newly entered their world. They were curious, dignified, and adorable. Sam fell in love. She stood there motionless and continued her communion with the dolphins for quite a while more, dumbstruck with admiration. Oh my god, Sam thought to herself, I can’t believe how lucky I am! Thank you! The feeling of peace and happiness was almost overwhelming, just from standing that close to such sublime and joyful beings. “I can’t believe I’m really here,” Sam said, this time aloud and with a soft laugh.

  Her rapture abruptly disappeared as the supervisor walked outside and stumbled upon Sam gazing at the dolphins with almost religious wonder. He had seen that look before among rookies. It never lasted long. The supervisor snuck up behind Sam and whispered:

  “God? Are you there, God?”

  Samantha was stunned and hurt. Clearly this guy was making fun of her dolphin worship. His underlying message, she would come to realize, was this: “Don’t get so involved—these animals are here to do a job. There’s no magic, there’s nothing mystical. They’re just animals.”

  PART ONE

  BLACKFISH

  1

  Marine Biologist

  Naomi Rose fell in love with dolphins at the age of thirteen. It happened in 1975 while she was watching An Evening with John Denver, a major television special that aired that year.

  To Naomi, nobody was better than the Rocky Mountain songster with the boyish grin and dirty-blond mop. John Denver was the reason why she had purchased a cheap, used acoustic guitar and started strumming simple sounds from a chord chart. She had every John Denver album there was and soon taught herself to play many of his songs, belting them out with gusto.

  Denver’s 1973 smash hit, “Rocky Mountain High,” had made Naomi a fan, but it also sparked her desire to work around wildlife, move to Colorado, and become a park ranger.

  Another John Denver song, “Calypso” (1975), made her want to become a marine biologist. Calypso was the name of the retired minesweeper that Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a longtime friend of Denver’s, converted into a floating marine research lab. John Denver wrote the song—one of his signature hits—in celebration of Cousteau, his crew, and the beloved white vessel they made world-famous.