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

by David Kirby

  Once in the heart of Texas, Kalina would become pregnant, at approximately just six years of age, by the male Kotar, who’d had his own share of traveling around North America. Kotar was one of the smallest orcas ever captured when he was taken from the waters off southeast Iceland in October 1978 at one or two years of age. Kotar spent two and a half years at SeaWorld San Diego before being moved to Orlando, where he worked another seven years.

  But in January 1987, SeaWorld Florida acquired another male from Canada’s Marineland Ontario—a large and moody male named Kanduke, the only Transient whale in the collection. He had been captured in 1975 in Pedder Bay, a narrow inlet just south of Victoria, British Columbia.10

  The mammal-eating Pacific whale and the fish-eating Icelandic whale did not get along. One day they got into a fierce altercation. The two males repeatedly beached themselves on the slide-out and made loud crying noises. At the peak of the battle, Kotar bit Kanduke’s penis, severely wounding it and leaving a four-inch scar.11 That attack got Kotar banished to San Antonio, in 1988. There he mated with young Kalina. Kalina gave birth to a son, Keet, in 1993.12

  As for Kalina, not until October 1994 did the traveling whale return home to Orlando, where she was reunited with her mother, Katina, after a four-and-a-half-year separation. Baby Shamu had to leave her own eighteen-month-old baby, Keet, in San Antonio. She was also now pregnant by Kotar again, just one year after Keet’s birth. The gestation period for killer whales is seventeen to eighteen months, and wild females tend to space their calves at intervals of about five years.13 Kalina’s second calf, a male named Keto, was born in Orlando in 1995.14 He would grow up to become the most notorious killer whale in the world, after Tilikum.

  Katina was kept busily pregnant, too. Twenty months after having Kalina, she was impregnated once again, this time by the aggressive Transient Kanduke. Their hybrid offspring, a female named Katerina, was born at Orlando on November 4, 1988.15 Katerina would be shipped off to Ohio in April of 1991, after spending just two and a half years with her mother.16 In November 1994 she would be reassigned to San Antonio, where she would die four and a half years later of bacterial pneumonia and severe hemorrhage at ten years of age.17

  The average life expectancy for female orcas in the wild has been estimated in published studies to be forty-five to fifty years, with a maximum life span of about ninety.18

  Three other lower-caste whales were in Orlando. Kenau had been caught in Iceland in 1976 at a young age, along with another female named Gudrun. Kenau’s life in captivity was difficult: She was moved on several occasions between California, Florida, Ohio, and Texas. In 1988, Kenau gave birth to her second calf (the first died after eleven days), named Kayla.19 In early 1991, Kenau was sent to Orlando without Kayla, and Kayla was transferred to Ohio, at just two years of age. Kenau would only last seven months in Orlando. On August 6, 1991, she died of hemorrhagic bacterial pneumonia. She was pregnant again already—in her twelfth month of gestation. Kenau was about seventeen.20

  By August of 1991, when Sam went to work at Shamu Stadium, only two orcas remained there beside the matriarch Katina: the subdominant Gudrun and her daughter, Taima. Gudrun had been caught with Kenau in Iceland and shipped to an aquarium in the Netherlands. In late 1987 she was flown to SeaWorld Orlando.21 Gudrun had a rough time of things in Florida, though she did manage to produce a calf with Kanduke. In July 1989, their half-Transient, half-Icelandic daughter, Taima, was born.22 Gudrun was a good mother to Taima, but not so with her second calf, Nyar, whom she would have in late 1993.23

  With its orca population dwindling, SeaWorld Florida must have been eager to secure some replacements. But it was now much harder to capture wild killer whales: Canada, Iceland, and Washington State had banned the practice—taking orcas from other US waters would have sparked a public relations catastrophe. The most viable options for replenishing the killer whale population were captive breeding and importing animals from other parks.

  On top of that, Orlando had a sperm problem. After Kanduke died, SeaWorld Florida would have no other males left: Kotar. The park needed new orcas, but it was critical to find at least one more healthy adult male with a strong libido.

  SeaWorld began looking at the options. One possibility was a pathetic, lesion-covered whale owned by a Mexico City amusement park, Reino Aventura. His name was Keiko (KAY-koh), and he was about to star in some Warner Bros. picture called Free Willy. The other candidate was an eleven-year-old male in Victoria, Canada. He didn’t have lesions, but he did come with a bad rap sheet—along with his tankmates, Haida II and Nootka IV.

  His name, of course, was Tilikum, and SeaLand of the Pacific was ready to unload him.

  3

  Capture

  The East Fjords of Iceland are sliced from some of the most rugged and breathtaking chunks of earth found on the planet. Here, along this supremely isolated stretch of coast, as far across the island from the capital, Reykjavík, as one can journey, a sawtooth pattern of bays and deep-water fjords were carved into the volcanic stone by retreating glaciers during the last ice age.

  The eastern landscape is a visual phantasmagoria of moss green, sea blue, ice white, and lava red-black, spilled across the tangled cliffs and undulating ridges of wind-carved pumice.

  Life doesn’t come easy in this part of the world, and the east coast of Iceland is not without its sagas of human suffering—both historical and apocryphal. One site of particular sorrow is the twelve-mile-long Berufjördur (or Bera’s Fjord), one of the most hauntingly lovely corners of the island nation.

  The area is named for an early settler, a hearty Nordic woman called Bera, who operated a farm on the fjord along with her husband, Soti. According to legend, one winter’s afternoon, Bera, Soti, and the entire household mounted their horses and rode over the craggy pass to attend a neighbor’s party in the Fljot Valley, near the present-day town of Egilsstadir.

  On the trip home, a ferocious winter storm blew in over the glaciated peaks to the west. The entire group froze to death, except for Bera, whose horse found its way back to the farm. When they finally came upon the cozy homestead, Bera’s mount grew so excited it galloped straight for the barn, with Bera still in the saddle. Bera hit the doorway, broke her neck, and died a forlorn death.

  In the seventeenth century, marauding buccaneers from faraway North Africa arrived by sea, unleashing a bloody hell on Icelanders settled along the east coast. The pirates reportedly looted, killed, and burned down Berufjördur farms before moving down the shoreline, reportedly capturing another 240 people in the Westman Islands for their lucrative slave market back home.

  Berufjördur might be tough on humans, but it’s quite ideal if you’re a killer whale. Each year, large numbers of Icelandic orcas descend on this end of the island and its sheltered fjords, the preferred overwintering grounds of Atlantic herring, their favorite meal.

  Icelandic killer whales have not been studied extensively, but it’s possible to envision a little bit of what their life might be like in the icy North Atlantic. Imagine for a moment that you are a young killer whale—a male, about two years of age, maybe nine feet long—and you are swimming alongside the safety and comfort of your mother through a cold, choppy sea, a generous stratum of blubber insulating you from the chill.

  You began eating fish about a year ago, but you still try to coax your mom into squeezing a bit more fatty, white milk into the water near your probing rostrum. Once in a while she acquiesces. But she has made it clear that your nursing days are drawing to a close. If you want to eat, well, here you are at the mouth of a narrow fjord filled with silvery herring. Eat already.

  As the youngest sibling, you get the traveling spot right next to your mother, which you won’t have to abandon until she has another baby, probably in a couple more years (Icelandic males might stay near their mother for life, like Resident orcas in the American Northwest, but scientists are unsure). For now, you are the center of attention. Your brothers and sisters mill about and forage. Not to
o far away, your mom’s sisters and their kids are also catching herring. Their mother—your grandmother, who sometimes keeps you in line—is within earshot.1

  There are enough fish for everybody. But you are puzzled by those odd dark blobs bobbing on the surface. You don’t know what boats are—yet—nor do you realize that the odd lacy curtains that drape from their decks can trap herring in large purses made of netting. You are dying to satisfy your curiosity and go investigate, but mom and grandma keep you in line.

  Your world is primarily acoustic, filled with the sounds of the sea. It’s a never-ending symphony of clicks, whistles, squeals, and yelps from your own family, backed up by a chorus carried beneath the waves: the clicks of other orca pods; the horsing around of white-sided dolphins; the rolling of stones on the ocean floor; the eerie song of a humpback whale, a hundred miles out at sea.

  When not engrossed in the ocean’s music, you splash about in the chop of a blustery afternoon or play with your siblings, with kelp, and with your food. When you “spy-hop” out of the water (pop up vertically to have a look around), your excellent eyesight can see towns and sheep and volcanic formations like nothing you’ve seen underwater. The sunsets are spectacular.

  In other words, you are a happy little whale. (Science tells us that animal contentment cannot be measured, though SeaWorld employees have publicly stated that they “know” their captive orcas are content, an illogical inconsistency, critics point out.)

  Then one gray morning in November, the world as you know it comes to an end.

  You and your pod are foraging for herring near Berufjördur. A painfully loud clackity-clack-clack reverberates through the water as one of the blobs—a boat, as you are about to learn—comes toward you. The sea is dark and you can’t see much, but you can tell from the sounds that the boat is moving in fast.

  Your family senses that something is not right. They begin turning away from the boat, which has never before gotten so close. Your mother issues a shriek. Danger! Flee! Now! Confused and gripped with terror, you make a run for it, trying to catch up with your mom, swimming just ahead.

  Then you are stopped. You kick your flukes furiously, trying to propel yourself through the water, but you cannot swim. You realize you have darted directly into the lacy curtain. So has your entire family.

  Panic ensues. You and your family swim around the perimeter of the net, but there is no way out. You are kept in there for hours, flailing about with nowhere to go.

  Suddenly, you are snagged in another, smaller net. You cry out in shock and fear, calling for your mother. CREEEEEEEE-eeeeeee! You feel the net being pulled through the water toward the boat. Your heart races and you surface to breathe, quickly and with difficulty. What is going on? Where is your mom?

  Then you hear her. You have never heard this wretched wail before: mournful, ragged, spiked with rage and terror. Now your other relatives have joined the awful remonstration. You answer their panicked cries with your own chaotic vocalizations as you’re hauled from the water on a canvas sling. You are now suspended in the air ten feet above the surface. The harsh wind on your wet skin feels alien and frightening. You can hear the cries of your frantic family, milling around in helpless grief. This morning you were happy. Now you are trapped in hell.

  The sling is lowered onto the deck. You are placed in a large foam-lined tub half-filled with seawater. Men in parkas and wool hats yell to each other in vocalizations that are deep, fearsome, and indecipherable.

  You miss your mother already. She has never been more than a few feet from your side. You can hear her, calling for you in despair. She is next to the hull, in the open sea. Then you hear a mechanical roar and you sense you are moving across the water. It’s a terrifying feeling. Over the din of the engine you can just make out the screams of your family. They have been freed from the nets. They are following the boat. You wonder when this will end, so you can be reunited with your pod and go back to your herring and kelp.

  That will never happen.

  Instead, you chug along for a long time. Eventually your mother gets tired and stops following. You no longer hear your family. You are alone, sick with worry. You want your mom—and to go home.

  Finally the racket of the engine ceases. The silence is overpowering. Then you hear men yelling again as your tub is put on a flatbed truck and driven for another hour or two. When the truck stops, you are lifted by the sling once again. This time, you are lowered into a small concrete tank built inside a shed. You cannot see the sky and there is little sound. You have never heard such silent water.

  Two other animals like you are in the tank—one male, one female. They are about your age and size, but you do not know them. When they begin making sounds, you cannot recognize their vocalizations. They seem as confused and dejected as you.

  A year goes by. Humans coax you into jumping out of the water and touching your rostrum to a big red ball suspended above the indoor tank. It gives you something to do, and they give you fish each time you do it.

  More humans come to stare at you from the edge of the tank, pointing, laughing, and producing bright camera flashes that bother your eyes. Then your tankmates disappear one at a time. Finally, your day comes. You are lifted by the sling yet again, put into another Styrofoam tub, trucked to an airfield, and loaded onto a cargo plane.

  Many hours later, you find yourself in a watery enclosure thousands of miles away. You don’t know it, but you are now in a different ocean, called the Pacific. The small pool you are in is netted off from a larger bay and surrounded by floating docks, on which lots of people and their flashing lights have gathered to gawk at you. Beyond the nets, you can hear other killer whales swimming around out in the strait.

  Two other orcas are in the tank with you—they are older, much larger, and female. Though they were both caught in Iceland, you do not recognize their vocalizations. You are now three years old. You miss your mother terribly. You think one of these older females will be kind to you, comfort you, protect you. But they are too busy fighting with each other for dominance. You hear the humans calling them names—one they call Nootka and the other Haida. Before long, you are being called something, too: Tilikum.

  You are subdominant. The only time that Nootka and Haida pay any attention to you is when they harass you, rake your back with their teeth, and chase you around the tank. What you wanted was succor; now you just want escape. You are denied both.

  On most nights, you and the older females are locked up in a small indoor tank adjacent to the pool. It is made of metal and barely large enough to accommodate all three of you (the owner is worried that one of you might chew through the net that separates you from the sea, or that some softhearted human might try to liberate you through sabotage).

  The humans call your nocturnal quarters the module. You quickly learn to despise it. They often lock you up in there for fourteen hours on end—from 5:00 p.m., when most people go home, until 7:00 a.m., when they come back. There is barely room to turn around in the module, let alone escape from your cell mates. All three of you routinely cut and scratch yourselves on the metal sides of the module. When the two girls are feeling aggressive, your life can become hell. Your skin is perpetually covered in scars from Nootka and Haida.

  One night when Nootka is particularly hostile, she swings her head at you, jaws agape, only to smash her rostrum into the metal wall. Her head starts to hemorrhage and she spouts blood from her blowhole. On other mornings, when the humans let you out of the tomblike structure, part of your fluke looks like hamburger.

  But if you refuse to go into the module at night, which you sometimes do, the humans will significantly cut back your supply of dead fish (you sorely miss chasing live fish). In fact, there seems to be a food shortage here. You are kept perpetually peckish—always a bit underfed, never fully satiated.2 But you learn that if you jump out of the water exactly as taught, you can tamp down your hunger quite a bit, though it never fully goes away. It gets to the point where you cannot wait to
perform.

  This goes on for seven years. You mature. You grow. Your dorsal fin sprouts and then flops over. You get horny. Even though Nootka and Haida are dominant over you, they still go into heat and want to breed. You oblige them. By the time you are ten, they are both pregnant.

  Your life is so very different from what you can remember back in Iceland. You yearn for winters in Berufjördur, for live herring, for your mother. These humans are okay, you suppose, but why do they lock you up with such overbearing females each night?

  You become unsettled, you get neurotic, you ache for change.

  Then, one dreary February afternoon, just like that, one of your trainers accidentally dips her foot in the water. You have never quite seen this before.

  You are bored. You grab her foot.

  4

  Santa Cruz

  In the mid-1980s, the University of California at Santa Cruz held a kind of Shangri-la mystique for many prospective students trying to decide where to study. The sprawling campus, seventy-five miles south of San Francisco, is set amid the meadows and redwoods of the rugged mountains overlooking Santa Cruz and the broad sweep of Monterey Bay beyond.

  The school, founded in 1965, retained much of its counterculture underpinnings: Transcendental Meditation and “aura adjustments” at sunset; mellow pot parties with Grateful Dead music spinning on the turntable; magic mushrooms sprouting in nearby cow pastures. It was a natural hotbed of antiwar liberalism and a mecca for organic farming and environmental activism long before green meant something other than envy or cash. More contemplative ashram than tailgating party school, Santa Cruz helped put the hip in hippie.

  In the 1980s, undergraduates called UCSC “Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp,” although the graduate programs were world-class and highly respected. The collegiate environment was progressive by design and decidedly laid-back. Most students were given written evaluations instead of grades (science majors could opt for both).