by David Kirby
Despite the bruising work, there was “huge pressure to suck it up and not to report injuries … or else. And there are definitely situations with the whales that are not written up—and for a variety of reasons” they tended to get “swept under the rug.”
Jeff asked his source if he could share their e-mail exchanges with John Black, the Department of Labor attorney who would lead the courtroom battle against SeaWorld in September. The trainer agreed.
Jeff passed the information along to Black. Coming from an anonymous source, it was of no use at trial, but it certainly provided insight behind the scenes at SeaWorld. To Jeff, it seemed as if little had changed since he worked there.
“You are right on the money with your assessment,” the trainer wrote back. “Regardless if it’s 1995 or 2011, it’s the same.”
* * *
Naomi Rose was headed back to British Columbia. She’d been to Vancouver on business over the years, but not to her field site since 1994. In May of 2011, she and Chris were on a plane to Victoria, for the Society for Conservation Biology’s International Marine Conservation Congress. Chris was president of the society’s Marine Section and was serving as the conference program cochair.
Naomi was scheduled to make a presentation on science and policy in Victoria, but Chris and his colleague Leslie Cornick wanted to turn it into something more. Leslie tried to organize a debate on marine mammal captivity as an evening event but, despite a widespread search, could not find anyone willing to take the pro side. It was both gratifying and infuriating.
The debate became a discussion. Naomi shared the stage with Paul Spong, who delighted some one hundred conferees with his stories about Skana, Hyak, Springer, and other orcas. One audience member, an older researcher who strongly supported cetacean display, spoke up during the Q&A, and the one-sided discussion briefly took on the liveliness of a real debate. Alexandra Morton, the naturalist and environmental activist, gave a conference keynote address, speaking of salmon farms throughout the killer whales’ habitat, where salmon fry were infected with farm-generated diseases that in turn infected wild salmon. She spoke passionately about her efforts to curb the aquaculture industry in British Columbia, which was indirectly devastating the whales.
After Victoria, Naomi and Chris headed up the island to Telegraph Cove. The place had changed: The cove itself was now choked with pleasure-boat slips, awaiting the summer crush. An unsightly two-story hotel crowded one side of the inlet; custom-built homes were going up on the bluff overlooking the strait. The couple stayed in one of the original wooden bungalows built on stilts over the water.
Because it was still May, the Northern Residents had not yet made their appearance, though that hardly put a damper on the trip. Naomi got to show Chris her old stomping grounds and catch up with friends from her field-study days. Telegraph Cove might have changed, but the people she knew were still the same.
It was wonderful to spend time with Jim Borrowman and his second wife, Mary. Jim took Naomi out on a highly nostalgic spin on the Gikumi. They called at Alert Bay and picked up Paul Spong and Helena Symonds before setting out for Hanson Island, OrcaLab, and Blackfish Sound. Dall’s porpoises played at the bow at one point, thrilling all aboard.
Naomi and Chris also drove over to Hidden Cove Lodge (a road had finally been cleared) and paid a surprise visit to Dan and Sandra Kirby. It felt great to be back. One morning, Bill MacKay and his wife, Donna, took the couple out on their state-of-the-art tour boat, the Naiad Explorer, which was fast enough to take them all the way down to West Cracroft and back before noon. The island had not changed. Naomi pointed out where Cliff Camp and Boat Camp used to be. Across Johnstone Strait, the Mike Bigg–Robson Bight reserve sat in its isolated glory.
In May, there would normally have been at least some salmon running, but today none were to be seen. “These damn Norwegian fish farms,” Bill said as he navigated the vessel. “They’re wiping out the wild salmon,” he added bitterly.
If the salmon farms could somehow be stopped, the whales would have a fighting chance.
* * *
Naomi had worked to convince federal regulators that the situation at Loro Parque was dire enough to warrant intervention by US officials. She had spearheaded the lobbying efforts by HSUS, WDCS, and the Animal Welfare Institute to bring official attention to Suzanne Allee’s report on the SeaWorld whales in Spain.
It had been months. Finally, on June 2, 2011, she got an answer.
A NMFS official, Michael Payne, wrote to Naomi advising her that the agency was in receipt of Naomi’s letter, Suzanne’s statement, and SeaWorld’s response denying any serious problems at Loro Parque.
NMFS and the Marine Mammal Commission had met with SeaWorld executives to review HSUS’s concern. “SeaWorld explained their oversight role over the care and maintenance of the killer whales,” Payne said, and maintained “direct oversight” over their care through regular conference calls, site visits, and staff exchanges.
Based on that, NMFS was “satisfied that the maintenance of the killer whales at Loro Parque is in compliance” with MMPA provisions on public display.
“We note that HSUS has not visited Loro Parque,” Payne wrote with a whiff of bureaucratic condescension. “Should you choose to do so, we would encourage you to report back your findings to both NMFS and the Marine Mammal Commission for consideration.”
* * *
Many lives were altered by the terrible events that occurred that gray February day at SeaWorld Orlando. That of DC-based journalist Tim Zimmermann was no exception. The attack and its aftermath sent him on a dogged investigation of SeaWorld, captive killer whales, and the entire display industry. After his “Killer in the Pool” article appeared in Outside magazine, Tim launched a series of hard-hitting exposés, called “Diary of a Killer Whale,” on his own website.
In July of 2011, Tim completed another article on the industry, this time digging deep into the disaster at Loro Parque that left young Spanish trainer Alexis Martinez dead in the orca pool. The article, “Blood in the Water,” was published online by Outside magazine.8 Tim had obtained and translated the corporate incident report and the Canary Islands government inquest report and brought new details of the death to the English-speaking world.
On Christmas Eve of 2009 Brian Rokeach, the senior trainer from San Diego who was on rotation at Loro Parque, was rehearsing a new show with Loro Parque staff, including trainer Alexis Martinez. Rokeach was working as the control trainer from the main stage as Martinez joined Keto in the pool. Martinez initiated a stand-on behavior (balancing atop the whale’s rostrum as the animal rises vertically out of the water). Keto drove Martinez with proper force, but as he rose, he leaned slightly to one side. Martinez toppled off, and Rokeach decided not to bridge Keto because of the error.
Martinez tried the stunt again, but Keto began twisting as he rose toward the surface. Martinez stopped the behavior and gave Keto an LRS (least reinforcing scenario)—or a three-second neutral response, which is usually followed up with an opportunity for the whale to remain calm and attentive. That in turn is reinforced with a reward. It worked: Keto obeyed a call to go to a shallow ledge across from the stage, where another trainer gave him some fish.
Martinez said he was going to perform a haul-out, in which Keto would propel him down into the water and then up onto the stage. But Keto went too deep, and Martinez aborted the behavior. He held out his hand, a signal for Keto to follow him, and they floated to the surface in unison. Martinez again delivered an LRS to Keto for having failed. But Keto did not respond properly this time around.
The whale remained calm, but he moved in between Martinez and the stage. Martinez requested an underwater tone to call Keto over to Rokeach at the stage. Keto responded. But according to the incident report (translated from Spanish), Rokeach noticed that Keto was “not committed to remaining under control” and growing “big-eyed.” Rokeach used a hand target to get Keto to focus on him. Martinez treaded water patiently in the middl
e of the tank, waiting for the right moment to swim toward the slide-over (a ramp that links the main pool with those backstage) and exit the water. As Keto calmed down, Martinez slowly made his move.
But Keto noticed the trainer. He started to lean toward Martinez. Rokeach knew he was about to lose control of the whale and gave him another hand target. The effort failed. Keto charged. The orca reached the young man in seconds, then “rammed him and violently played with his body,” a supervisor told investigators.
Keto forced Martinez to the tank’s bottom. Rokeach slapped the water—with no response. After several agonizing moments, Keto finally obeyed the call-to-stage signal. Martinez lay motionless down in the depths. “Rokeach sounded the emergency alarm,” Tim wrote in the Outside article. “Keto took a quick breath, returned to Martinez, and then came back to the surface carrying Martinez’ limp body across his rostrum. Rokeach called for the team to get a net while others raced to corral the other three killer whales into one of the back pools.”
Keto submerged with the trainer again. Martinez had been underwater for nearly three minutes. Rokeach and another trainer dove in to retrieve him. Martinez was unconscious. Blood spewed from his nose and mouth. “A distraught Rokeach immediately initiated CPR. A defibrillator was brought out, and Loro Parque called for an ambulance,” Tim wrote. “But Martinez was never revived.”
Loro Parque called the killing an “unfortunate accident” in a statement released in Spanish. An “unexpected reaction of the animal” had led Keto to knock into Martinez, compressing his chest and causing asphyxiation. Keto’s behavior “did not correspond to the way in which these marine mammals attack their prey in the wild.” It was instead merely a “shifting of position.” But Martinez’s autopsy told another story. His was a “violent death,” it said. He had sustained multiple cuts and abrasions, a lacerated liver, badly damaged internal organs, a collapse of both lungs, fractures of ribs and his sternum, and puncture wounds “consistent with the teeth” of killer whales.
“The corporate incident report,” Tim wrote, “in effect acknowledges the imperfect understanding between man and whale.” It concluded that Keto’s behavior was “unforeseen” and “incorrect,” Tim noted. “‘Incorrect’ is a wholly inadequate description of what Keto did to Alexis Martinez. But it’s the ‘unforeseen’ part that should make any trainer nervous.”
SeaWorld had sent four young orcas to Loro Parque and three of them—Keto, Tekoa, and Skyla—now had a “history of incidents,” Tim wrote. The fourth whale, Kohana, gave birth to her first calf, Adán, in 2010—she rejected him immediately and never nursed him. He was raised by hand. Now five young whales were living without the guidance and supervision of more mature members of their species.
The Canary Islands labor ministry, meanwhile, reached a similar conclusion to OSHA’s findings from Orlando. The danger of water work lay “precisely in the interaction with an animal that weighs more than [sixty-six hundred pounds] and is in its natural environment.” The only way to eliminate the risk to workers was “prohibition of the activity.”
As for SeaWorld, whether water work should be ended or “severely constrained by safety measures,” Tim wrote, “will be decided by the OSHA proceedings.”
* * *
Officials at NMFS may have felt little compulsion to investigate SeaWorld’s “loaner” orcas in Spain, but for many US activists that didn’t excuse the agency from ignoring what was happening at home.
When Kalina died the previous October, SeaWorld told ABC News, “Animals in our care live and die just as they do in the wild.” But members of the Orca Aware confederacy were discovering more and more evidence to show that some killer whales in SeaWorld’s care neither lived nor died “just” as they do in nature. Wendy Cooke of the Without Me There Is No You site found a paper in a scientific journal that revealed the true cause of death for Kanduke, the big male Transient who died in 1990. Wendy sent the study to John Kielty at The Orca Project, who had obtained Kanduke’s necropsy report via FOIA. John then sent all the information to Courtney Vail, who wrote about Kanduke on the WDCS blog:
“WDCS is shocked to learn of another way that captivity kills.” Kanduke had died “suddenly and unexpectedly after deteriorating very quickly.” In one of the scientific studies actually conducted on a SeaWorld orca, company vets were puzzled by his rapid decline and sent tissue samples to Yale University for assessment. In 1993, a study funded in part by SeaWorld and published in Clinical and Diagnostic Virology reported finding St. Louis encephalitis (SLE) virus, an avian pathogen transmitted by mosquitoes, in Kanduke.9 No marine mammal had ever before been found with SLE.
The necropsy and article suggested “a direct causal link between orca confinement and premature death,” Courtney wrote. “There was an outbreak of St. Louis Virus in Florida during the summer of 1990, when the whale was bitten by mosquitoes that were infected with this virus.” She said former trainers Jeff Ventre and Carol Ray witnessed mosquitoes on Kanduke’s back and the sunburned and peeling condition of his skin. In contrast, wild whales “would not be stationary and suspended with their backs at the water’s surface for hours each night, thereby exposed to Florida mosquitoes carrying the avian virus.”
Kanduke’s case, it turned out, was not an isolated incident. Another study coauthored by SeaWorld researchers, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, described the death of fourteen-year-old Taku, a male orca who died suddenly in San Antonio in 2007. The cause was West Nile virus. Equally alarming, all six of the other orcas in San Antonio tested positive for the virus, which can be transmitted to people via mosquitoes. In 2007, Jeff discovered, Texas was among the five states with the highest number of West Nile cases.
Again, a whale in British Columbia or Iceland was highly unlikely to contract a tropical disease such as West Nile virus. “From what I can tell, and after browsing several papers and articles, these types of mosquitoes are limited to coastal marshes and mangrove swamps,” Jeff wrote to the group. “Wild killer whales would not be exposed to such vectors of disease transmission. And thus it could be stated that the exotic infections that have killed at least two captive SW orcas … were directly attributed to their confinement in unnatural spaces.”
* * *
Throughout 2011, the Orca Aware group kept growing. Several new people, including scientists Naomi Rose, Lori Marino, and Ingrid Visser, had joined the discussion. The alliance had spilled out of the confines of its Google home and morphed into an informal e-mail chain, with people writing back and forth several times a day. The exchange of news, gossip, and inside intelligence collected from a clandestine cadre of well-placed informants was voluminous.
Jeff Ventre was amazed by the aggregation of individuals who had been drawn together by their passion for killer whales. They came from distant corners of the country and the world, each with unique insights, experiences, and talents.
It was time for a powwow. Jeff had begun planning a mass gathering earlier in the year, and now, in mid-July, it was actually happening. Nearly the entire group was headed for San Juan Island for several days of eating, drinking, kayaking, and watching and talking about whales. Naomi decided not to go: She had just been to British Columbia, had been traveling a lot since then, and had run out of personal leave.
Most people stayed in some cozy cabins at Snug Harbor, on the island’s west side near Ken Balcomb’s Center for Whale Research. Jeff and his girlfriend, Chica, were among the first to arrive, along with Jeff’s old friend Todd Bricker and his wife, Jamie. They were soon joined by Samantha Berg and her husband, Kevin Meddleton; Carol Ray and her husband, Eric Peterson; Jeff’s sister, Kim, and her partner, Marty Neese; and Dean Gomersall, who used to work at Whale and Dolphin Stadium with Jeff and the others and was now anti-SeaWorld, and his friend Breanne Antonius. Dr. Lori Marino flew in from Atlanta, joined by her significant other, Michael Mountain, cofounder of Best Friends Animal Society and author of a blog on animal rights and other issues called Zoe Nature.
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nbsp; Tim Zimmermann also traveled to the island, along with a film crew that had retained him to work on a feature documentary about the entire Tilikum/captive-orca saga; Gabriela Cowperthwaite was the director and Manny Oteyza the producer. Already on San Juan Island were Howie Garrett and Susan Berta, Ken Balcomb, Astrid van Ginneken from Holland, and Stefan Jacobs from Germany.
Days were spent whale watching from chartered boats, or from the cliffs of Lime Kiln Point or American Camp. In the evenings, everyone would gather for dinner, drinks, and whale talk. They often socialized at the ocean-view home of Candace Calloway Whiting, one of many people who’d moved to the island “to be close to the orcas, and the water,” she said. Candace, who had studied and trained dolphins, seals, and orcas, volunteered at the Center for Whale Research and authored a blog about cetaceans for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
One evening after dinner, the black fins of Resident whales were seen from Candace’s home, rolling along the island’s edge in the lingering summer dusk. A researcher at NMFS’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, Dr. John Durban, presented recent data on orca ecotypes in Antarctica, and Howie spoke about the importance of symbols in the formation of orca culture. Lori Marino followed up with an engaging talk on orca intelligence, followed by the screening of a documentary, The Whale, produced by Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm, a couple from the Canadian side of Haro Strait, who boated over for the evening.
The Whale told the emotional saga of Luna, the young killer whale who was separated from his family deep within a fjord on Vancouver Island. With no other orcas to bond with, Luna began bonding with boaters and other people. The film’s executive producers were Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson, and the narration was provided by Reynolds, who grew up in British Columbia. The Whale was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and The Seattle Times called it “a gorgeous and provocative film.”