by David Kirby
But the redrafting of the original Narrative Summary proceeded. Naomi learned that SeaWorld attorneys were working alongside Cal/OSHA officials to make the changes. She requested copies of the original and redrafted documents and compared them side by side. The edits were mostly deletions, with few additions or revisions. More than half of the original document was simply gone.
The redacted text excluded any references to killer whales being inherently dangerous and unpredictable; information on orcas displaying individual personality differences that made careful evaluation of their “mood” daily or even hourly essential for trainer safety; admissions by trainers that stressors in captivity did exist and contributed to unavoidable risks of animals going “off behavior”; and that trainers had “no tools at their disposal to punish an orca that is misbehaving. There is little that they can do to punish an animal of this size anyway.”
All descriptions of previous “off behavior” incidents at SeaWorld and other facilities (both injurious and non-injurious), save for two previous incidents with Kasatka and one incident two weeks earlier involving another whale at SeaWorld San Diego that resulted in a minor injury, were likewise deleted.
And of course any words about it being only a matter of time before someone was killed were likewise excised from the text.
“The original narrative summary made it clear that … in-water interactions were inherently risky and incidents such as the one between Kasatka and Peters could and should be anticipated,” Naomi would later write. “The final version implied the opposite, leaving the reader with the impression that in-water interactions were inherently safe, that ‘off behavior accidents’ and attacks were completely aberrant, and that the routine safety precautions taken by trainers were good practice but almost never needed.”
After the report was withdrawn, SeaWorld went on the PR counterattack. The curator for SeaWorld Entertainment, Julie Scardina, appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live to defend orca captivity and—true to the park’s party line—suggested that whales were better off in protective tanks than the big, bad open ocean. She repeated the corporate mantra that the lucky whales were receiving “pampered care” while also educating the public about orcas in the wild.
“You know, a city person living in the city is very different from a person living in the country,” Scardina said. “They are so well taken care of, and what’s happening out in the wild right now certainly isn’t the best situation for the animals. Animals are barely surviving in many places out in the wild.”
“Are you saying they’re better off at SeaWorld?” King asked incredulously.
“I’m not saying they’re necessarily better off one place or another. Populations are declining in the wild. We’re taking great care of them in captivity. They’re educating people. They know us. They’re learning from us. We’re learning from them. And people didn’t even know about killer whales not that long ago. They were shooting them out in the wild.” SeaWorld had an opportunity to educate people with animals that were “getting the most pampered care that you have ever, you know, experienced. If you’ve ever had a dog that has a veterinarian on call twenty-four hours a day that has ten trainers to take care of it every single day.”
When Naomi watched the broadcast, she was struck by Scardina’s use of the word “job” to describe what killer whales “do” at SeaWorld. They were being worked, quite literally, to death, Naomi thought.
SeaWorld’s victory against Cal/OSHA was, however, dampened. The original Information Memorandum and Narrative Summary both appeared on various websites for all the public to see.
SeaWorld was not required to do anything to make its workplace safer for orca trainers. Cal/OSHA had only made suggestions, and those had been withdrawn.
Four years later, critics would charge that if Cal/OSHA hadn’t bowed to political pressure, Dawn Brancheau might still be alive.
30
Tenerife
Not long into the new century, SeaWorld officials must have realized they had a reproduction problem on their hands: If anything, the corporation’s orca breeding program was too successful. With only three parks to house its two dozen killer whales (SeaWorld Ohio closed in 2001), or eight per park, SeaWorld needed some spare real estate.
That’s where “breeding loans” came in. The arrangements—killer whale rentals, more than loans—provided yet another revenue stream for SeaWorld while alleviating its overcrowding problems. Breeding loans also built stronger relations with other display enterprises while increasing genetic diversity in the collections, where some inbreeding was becoming almost inevitable.
In February of 2006, SeaWorld flew four of its youngest captive-bred orcas to a marine park in Spain on a breeding loan. The Spanish facility, known as Loro Parque, or “parrot park,” was on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, the volcanic archipelago off the coast of western Africa.
Loro Parque was founded in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, in 1972 by German entrepreneur Wolfgang Kiessling as a tourist attraction featuring tropical parrots, but had since grown to include dolphins, sea lions, sharks, penguins, alligators, and land mammals such as gorillas, chimps, tigers, and panthers. It had just completed construction on a new stadium, Orca Ocean, featuring a large postmodern amphitheater covered in a graceful series of white panels resembling the sails of an Armada galleon.
Financial details on the transaction were not made public, but SeaWorld earned a certain percentage of every ticket sold as long as its whales remained at Loro Parque. The loan was for twenty-five years, with a ten-year renewal option. Loro Parque agreed to pay for transport costs of the whales and provide business-class tickets and accommodations for all SeaWorld staff who needed to visit Tenerife during the construction phase and the first year of operations. SeaWorld would provide a supervising trainer to Loro Parque for the first year or so, and the Spanish park agreed to cover the trainer’s five-star-hotel costs. Loro Parque also agreed to serve Anheuser-Busch beer products exclusively for its premium and imported beer.
The four young whales in the loan—two males and two females—had led lives that could best be described as “interrupted.” There was Kohana, three and a half years old, who was born at SeaWorld San Diego to Takara and (via artificial insemination) Tilikum in May 2002.1 When she was just shy of two years old, Kohana and her mother were transferred to Orlando. Eighteen months after that, in 2006, Kohana was separated from her mother and sent on her way to the Canary Islands. The other young female, Skyla, was born in Orlando in February of 2004 to Kalina and Tilikum but, at just two years of age, was dispatched to Spain.2
Skyla was related to both of the young males sent to Loro Parque. First there was three-year-old Tekoa, who shared a father with Skyla, Tilikum. Tekoa was born in Orlando to the hybrid Taima in 2000.3 Unpredictable Taima, who had attacked her firstborn calf, Sumar, showed the same aggressive tendencies toward Tekoa. He also had to be permanently separated from his mother after multiple attempts by Taima to hurt or kill him. So far, Taima was proving to be a poor mother.4 In April 2004, SeaWorld sent Tekoa to live in San Antonio, before he was flown to Tenerife in 2006.
Skyla was also the half sister of Keto, the son of Kalina and Kotar. He was by far the oldest and perhaps most dysfunctional killer whale of the Loro Parque quartet. Keto, ten, had been born in Orlando in 1995 but proved to be rowdy and somewhat unpredictable.5 Before he was four, Keto was sent to San Diego, where he spent just ten months before being transferred to Ohio for ten months, and then to San Antonio.6 Five years later, he was on the plane to Spain.
When Naomi learned about the “breeding loan” between SeaWorld and Loro Parque, and the young ages and disrupted lives of the four whales in question, taken from their mothers and other adults and sent by themselves somewhere else, she said to herself, “Nothing good can come of this.”
Naomi discovered that SeaWorld had been a critical component of Loro Parque’s new venture into killer whale training and display. Loro Parque “provided us greater flexibilit
y in managing our collection of killer whales,” SeaWorld spokesman Fred Jacobs explained.7 Clearly, SeaWorld would be intimately involved in the care, husbandry, and training of its four whales. Meanwhile, several Loro Parque trainers had spent a year at SeaWorld San Antonio to learn all the highly complex aspects of animal training, husbandry, medical care, nutrition, enrichment, safety, stage production, and more that make up the components of a killer whale show.
The imminent transfer of the four whales—whose care and welfare (as Naomi read the law) were still covered by the US Marine Mammal Protection Act while the property of an American facility—sparked an outcry among anti-captivity advocates. Naomi and other anti-cap groups voiced their concerns about the loan, and Naomi worked behind the scenes with her contacts at NMFS to glean more information about the deal. She wanted to see what legal mechanisms, if any, might be in place to block the transfer. But the options were flimsy. Unlike the import of a marine mammal to the United States, the export of animals did not require a permit or a period of public comment—thanks to the 1994 MMPA amendments. HSUS legal counsel conceded there was not much they could do.
But a colleague of Naomi’s at the UK-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Cathy Williamson, continued to pursue the matter with NMFS. She kept Naomi in the loop on her work, including a letter she sent to NMFS outlining why the deal should be struck down.
“We are extremely concerned at reports that the export will involve two very young female orcas, including one calf less than 22 months old that may still be suckling,” Cathy wrote. “Separating calves from their mothers at an early age can lead to infant mortality and directly contradicts the advice given by marine mammal veterinarians, including Jay Sweeney, who states, in the CRC Handbook of Marine Mammal Medicine that ‘attempts at removing a juvenile cetacean under two years of age from its mother frequently results in significant stress … [since it] remains emotionally dependent on its mother.’”
NMFS refused to take any action on the matter, and on February 14, 2006, the four young killer whales were flown to Tenerife.8
Opening ceremonies at Orca Ocean stadium in Loro Parque were a splashy affair, with three thousand guests, scores of VIPs, and more than two hundred reporters from the islands and the Continent, all gathered to see the first killer whales ever brought to the Canaries. The park’s founder and president, Wolfgang Kiessling, played proud host to the head of the Canary Islands autonomous government, and several American dignitaries, not least among them August Busch III.
Many senior staff from SeaWorld had also been flying in and out of the Canaries. Thad Lacinak, now vice president and corporate curator for animal training, was present when the whales arrived and oversaw their introduction into the new 7-million-gallon complex. Chief veterinarian James McBain traveled to Tenerife at regular intervals to check on the animals, and Brad Andrews committed himself to visit twice a year. Senior orca trainer Mark Galan was sent from Orlando to Loro Parque for the first eighteen months of operations to oversee training and animal-care programs at Orca Ocean, whose video surveillance system was transmitted back to the United States for monitoring by SeaWorld staff.
On March 17, 2006, the first show open to the public was performed by Loro Parque’s inexperienced staff and their young brood of whales. But problems with the new pools—the disturbing details of which would only come to light after the death of Dawn Brancheau—shut down the operation immediately. It took more than ten weeks to fix the pool issues: Loro Parque officially reopened on June 3. By that fall, things were running fairly smoothly with the orca shows.
Whenever SeaWorld’s on-site supervising trainer, Mark Galan, left the islands, he was temporarily replaced by other supervisors from SeaWorld. In September 2006, Dawn Brancheau got the chance to go. Dawn had ascended through the ranks and was now an accomplished trainer. Congenial, athletic, and extremely attuned to the animals, she was one of the most respected figures at Shamu Stadium in Florida. Dawn also knew Keto, Tekoa, Skyla, and Kohana, as all four whales had lived in Orlando at some point in their unsettled lives.
Dawn was as popular at Loro Parque as she was back home. The staff was dazzled by her craftsmanship in the tank. She worked closely with the other trainers and became good friends with a young man named Alexis Martinez—a Canary Islands native with short-cropped, black hair and a charismatic smile. Dawn would often hang out with Alexis and his fiancée, Estefanía Rodriguez, after hours in a local tapas place.
Back in North America, meanwhile, SeaWorld kept moving its whales around like multi-ton chess pieces. In November of 2006, SeaWorld dispatched a young male killer whale named Ikaika on another international breeding loan, this time from Orlando to Marineland Ontario. Meanwhile, SeaWorld officials also switched Kayla, from San Antonio, and Taku, from Orlando.
The following October, Loro Parque had its first serious incident between a killer whale and a trainer. Claudia Vollhardt, a twenty-nine-year-old from Germany, was working a preshow warm-up session with the three-thousand-pound juvenile Tekoa.9 The SeaWorld supervisor on duty at the time was Steve Aibel, the Texas trainer who had successfully calmed an amok Kyuquot and escaped from the pool unharmed in 2004.
Claudia Vollhardt had got her start at Loro Parque’s dolphinarium and then transferred to Orca Ocean. This particular day, she was having difficulty executing a foot push with Tekoa. After a few aborted tries, Tekoa became frustrated and took Vollhardt’s arm into his mouth.
Then he dove to the bottom.
After holding the trainer underwater for a moment, Tekoa dragged her back to the surface. He raced toward a metal gate separating the show pool from the back pools, and as others looked on in distress, Tekoa rammed Vollhardt against the gate several times.
Steve Aibel shouted to the other trainers to unfurl a net into the pool. A distracted Tekoa let go of the young woman, now unconscious, and Steve Aibel got her out of the water and administered CPR. Teeth marks clearly perforated her wet suit. Even as Vollhardt lay injured and bleeding by the pool’s side, Tekoa tried to lunge out of the water at her. An ambulance raced the wounded woman to La Laguna Hospital, where she was admitted to the ICU. Her right lung had been punctured and her forearm was fractured into three pieces.
Loro Parque said the attack was an “accident” brought about by bad luck. Water work was suspended for more than six months at Loro Parque and extra restrictions placed on working with Tekoa.
After the attack, Alexis Martinez confided in Vollhardt about his growing worries over Loro Parque’s whales and their increasingly unstable behavior. He was alarmed at how often the orcas were banging their heads on the metal gates. He had also witnessed many close calls, any number of which could quickly have turned hazardous.
More dreadful news slammed the industry in the coming months. On October 17, 2007, less than a year after his relocation from Orlando to San Antonio, the male Taku, born in 1993, suddenly died.10 He was fourteen. Taku was the son of Tilikum and Katina.11 Taku later impregnated his mother to produce Nalani in 2006,12 the world’s only fully inbred orca.
Eight months later, death claimed Taku’s niece, two-and-a-half-year-old Halyn, the female calf whose mother, Kayla, had refused to nurse her after her birth in San Antonio, a source of rejoicing among some staff at the prospect of hand-raising an orca calf from day one. The cause was acute encephalitis.13 “While we recognize that death is part of the life cycle,” SeaWorld said in a news release, “we are saddened over the unexpected loss of this animal.”
Then in the spring of 2009 Loro Parque’s youngest killer whale, five-year-old Skyla, joined her half brother Tekoa (both sired by Tilikum) in banishment from water work during shows at Tenerife. Skyla was in the pool with trainer Rafa Sanchez when she began shoving him around the pool with her rostrum during a show. She then rammed him into the pool wall.14
Now, only Keto and Kohana were allowed to perform water work at Loro Parque.
That summer, Dawn Brancheau’s friend Alexis Martinez turned to his person
al diary to describe his growing worries about the erratic behavior among the American whales. Their seemingly bottomless sex drives were on the verge of upending the fragile social order imposed upon the hormonally charged adolescents.
“Keto is obsessed with controlling Kohana, he won’t separate from her, including shows,” he wrote. “Tekoa is very sexual when he is alone with Kohana (penis out).” Meanwhile Keto was also engaging in homosexual behavior with Tekoa.15
In September of 2009, the rotating SeaWorld supervisor at Loro Parque was Brian Rokeach, the San Diego trainer who had been attacked by Orkid in 2006, resulting in a torn ankle ligament. Alexis wrote, “Brian had a small incident with Keto the first hour of the morning,” and said it had been “a very bad day for Keto.” A few days later he added this entry: “All the animals are bad. Dry day for Kohana.”
Back in the States, rumors were flying about a possible sale of the SeaWorld franchise to another corporation. Anheuser-Busch had been acquired by the huge Belgian conglomerate InBev. That company was reportedly only interested in the core drinks operations at Anheuser-Busch. On October 10, 2009, InBev announced it had sold SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment to a huge private equity firm, the Blackstone Group, for $2.7 billion.16 Blackstone’s other assets included part of SeaWorld Orlando’s competitor, Universal Studios, and a European company called Merlin Entertainments, which, ironically, had openly questioned the suitability of holding cetaceans in captivity.17 Blackstone also owned Legoland and Madame Tussauds. The SeaWorld deal included ten parks in total, with 25 million visitors a year, including Busch Gardens, Aquatica, and Discovery Cove.
SeaWorld officials said no immediate changes would be made to their operations, and the vast majority of visitors had no idea that the sale had even taken place. “It don’t matter,” park guest Lisa Dunagan told the Orlando Sentinel. “Everyone is here to see Shamu.”